The Parallel
by Qoheleth
Summary: Through the vagaries of space travel, a parallel universe's "Animorphs" have been transported to the reality we all know and love. Now they have to figure out a way to get home - but do all of them really want to?
1. Morph Force

Disclaimer: I do not own any part of the _Animorphs _series of books, nor am I in any way associated with those – namely, K.A. Applegate and Scholastic Books, Inc. – who do have that honor.

That said, if anyone attempts to pass this story off as his or her own, he or she is in a _lot_ of trouble.

A/N: This story is not what you would call "hard ff". It does not deal, except tangentially, with the Animorphs as we know them, although such concepts as Yeerks, morphing power, and a small cadre of underage Saviors of Earth are essential to it. If you have an aversion to original characters, or experimental ff generally, find another story.

* * *

My name is Elly.

I can't tell you my last name. I have one, of course – in fact, I'm very fond of it. It's just that if I do tell you my last name, you might be able to locate my friends and me – and if you did, the Yeerks might not be far behind. Which would not be a good thing.

The Yeerks. Big gray slugs, with the ability to crawl into a person's brain and completely control the person's body. A human who is captured by a Yeerk becomes the world's most complete slave. The only time she even has her own mind to herself is when the Yeerk leaves her body to feed on Kandrona rays, and that only happens for about an hour every three days.

That's not the worst part. The worst part is that the human remains fully aware of her surroundings, and especially of the Yeerk, even while infested. The human watches her Controller lie to her family and friends… watches them be swayed… watches them be taken over by Yeerks themselves, and she can do absolutely nothing about it.

I'm not using "she" randomly. I have a friend named Andrea who's been infested since she was four, when the first wave of Yeerks hit Earth. If it weren't for her, I probably would have quit fighting the Yeerks a long time ago.

I had an opportunity, not long ago, to free her from the Yeerks permanently. If I had only been a little quicker… or if I could have brought myself to drive my canines into her neck… I think about that a lot.

If you were reading the last paragraph very carefully, you might be thinking, "Hold it. Why is this sweet little girl talking about sinking her canines into people's necks? Does she think she's going to be a vampire when she grows up?"

No, of course not. That's just how I fight the Yeerks.

See, about a year ago (it must have been only a year, although it seems more like ten), my brother Josh, his girlfriend Abby, and I were out on a deserted stretch of road - along with a boy named Richard, whom none of us knew - when an alien spacecraft landed in front of us. Its pilot was a dying warrior named Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul: a member of the alien race called Andalites, who are terrific enemies of the Yeerks. He told us about the invasion of Earth, and offered us a weapon to fight them with: the ability to morph. Suddenly, the four of us had the ability to turn into any animal we could imagine, from an ant to a blue whale. All we had to do was touch the animal and focus, and we acquired that animal's DNA pattern, which we could use whenever we wanted.

With our new power, though, came a warning. Never, Elfangor said, stay in a morph for more than two hours. If any of us did, he or she would be trapped in that morph forever, and could never return to human form.

So far, we haven't had any accidents like that. So far.

Shortly after all this, we added a fifth member to our crew – an Andalite cadet named Anifal-Mekelial-Worrann, who had fought under Prince Elfangor. Without him, I think it's safe to say that we would have died several times over by now.

Together, we make up Earth's only real hope – the Morph Force. The name started out as a bad joke of Abby's, but I don't think any of us laugh at it any more.

So there you go. Five kids – four humans, one Andalite – who can turn into frogs. That's what's keeping the world safe from a race of some eight billion ruthless slugs. Depressing, isn't it?

I know. Sometimes the whole thing feels so hopeless I just want to fall down on my bed, grab my teddy bear (yes, I still have a teddy bear at the age of twelve), and cry myself into oblivion.

Then I look around my room, at the Irish Rover music littering the floor, the Calvin and Hobbes books on the shelf, and the glass unicorns on my desk, and I think, _what the heck. I can give this civilization one more day._

Just the same, even I need a day off sometimes.

Which is why, on the day this story starts, I was at the county fair, trying to convince Anifal to go on the Pendulum. (He was in his human morph, of course – the fair didn't give admittance to blue centaur-like aliens with scorpion tails.) I'm not sure why I was doing this – partly, I think, to get back at him for all the patronizing comments he had made about human technology.

"Andrew," I said, using his human pseudonym, "it's a perfectly harmless ride. You just get in, it swings you back and forth, and then you get off. If you close your eyes, you won't even know you're on a ride."

This was the same lie Josh had used to get me to go on. He said Daddy had used it on him, and Grandpa had used it on Daddy, and so on, I guess, back to the Middle Ages.

Anifal looked hesitant. He stepped back and squinted at the ride. "Then why," he asked, "are all those people screaming?"

"Most of them insisted on keeping their eyes open," I said.

Anifal still seemed dubious. "The human body," he commented, "would not seem to be built to go upside-down. Down. Dow-ow-own. That is an excellent word. D-d-d-downnnnn."

"But that's the whole point," I said. (You have to ignore it when Anifal does this kind of thing. He doesn't have a mouth in his Andalite form, so he thinks the ability to make your own sounds is this great novelty.) "It's all about facing your natural limitations and overcoming them. It's about being something more than human."

"I am something more than human," Anifal said fatuously. "I am And…"

I shushed him, then glanced around nervously. If any Yeerk overheard him saying the word "Andalite", we were done for.

"Andrew," I said, emphasizing the human name, "I've done this before, okay? Will you trust me?"

"No," said Anifal.

Which was probably smart of him, but it irritated me.

I pouted in silence for a few minutes. Then something truly evil occurred to me.

"You know, Andrew," I said, "I noticed a great concession stand a way back. They had everything…elephant ears, cotton candy, cinnamon buns…" I paused. "Klondike bars…"

Anifal's head swiveled around. "Klondike bars?" he said. "Bar-zuh?"

Now I should probably explain something. Since Anifal doesn't have a mouth in his Andalite form, he absorbs his food through his hooves and doesn't experience taste. Therefore, when he morphs to human, he gets a little goofy about all the different kinds of human food. And, for some weird reason, he goes particularly nuts over Klondike bars.

"Yep," I said. "Klondike bars. In fact, I probably have enough money on me to afford a couple."

Anifal blinked. "This is blackmail," he said.

"Darn right it's blackmail."

"Black-kuh. Bla-a-a-ack-mmmm…"

"Andrew," I said. "Are you going to ride it or not?"

"Er… I suppose," said Anifal reluctantly.

"Good," I said. "Now go get in line. It's almost stopped."

* * *

The next time I saw the brave Andalite soldier, he was staggering from the Pendulum, wearing on his face the expression of an alien who has just learned that even if humans can't build Z-space starships or morphing cubes, we reign supreme in the area of nausea-inducing motion devices.

"Had fun?" I inquired sweetly.

"Humans are mad," Anifal muttered.

"They certainly are," came a voice from behind me. I turned around and saw Chester standing by the ticket booth.

That's when I knew we were in trouble.

See, Chester is a Chee. A highly advanced, almost immortal android created by a now-extinct alien race called the Pemalites. He looks just like a human, but that's because the Chee have holographic equipment that makes Andalite cloaking technology look like clay animation.

The Pemalites programmed the Chee to be intensely non-violent, so they can't fight. They can, however, deliver compromising information about the Yeerks – which they do, on a regular basis. This makes them ideal spies – and, generally, bearers of very bad news.

"Hi, Chester," I said.

"Hi, Elly," he said. "Listen, the two of you might want to go get Josh and Abby – and Richard, if he's here. There's a little situation developing."

I sighed. "Oh, boy."


	2. Yeerkbane

"Very quickly," said Chester after he had cloaked us so we could speak freely, "the position is this. Reports have been made to various sources that Gellioss Base on the Yeerk homeworld has recently become home to two male vanarges."

This meant absolutely nothing to any of us. Even Anifal seemed a bit bewildered.

"Er…what was that again?" Josh asked.

"Gellioss Andalite Base," Chester repeated, "on the Yeerk homeworld, has become home to two male vanarges."

"And this is important because…" said Abby.

"The vanarx," said Chester, "or, to use its common nickname, the Yeerkbane, is the only natural enemy of a host-holding Yeerk. Other creatures can kill a Yeerk by killing the host – your battle morphs have made that clear – but only a vanarx can kill the Yeerk without killing the host."

There was a general uproar at this.

"What the polychromatic _blazes?_" Abby shouted.

"Why does the Andalite homeworld not know of this creature?" Anifal demanded.

"How many of these things are there in existence?" said Richard.

"How exactly does the vanarx do this?" Josh asked quietly.

I didn't say anything. I just sat there, unable to believe my ears. I'd been lighting votive candles for this for months.

See, at the time, we were in a tricky situation. None of us really liked attacking Yeerks while they were out of their hosts, feeding; it made us feel like cowards, besides being, as Abby said, "the ickiest thing since sliced slime mold". Plus, an Imperial soldier Yeerk isn't that much different, in slug state, from an ordinary citizen Yeerk, which meant that if we attacked the pool, we killed innocent people; there was no getting around it.

On the other hand, it was even worse to attack them when they were in hosts. In that case, to kill the Yeerk, you had to kill the host, too, and, with rare exceptions, the hosts were even more innocent than the civilian Yeerks.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Unless we had a morph that could kill the Yeerks while they were in the host, and leave the host unharmed. Then everything would change. We could charge into the Yeerk pool, massacre every combatant Yeerk in the joint, and it wouldn't be any worse than a normal war. We would be liberators of the hosts, not apologetic executioners. Andrea… could be freed…

I jerked myself back to reality. Chester appeared to be answering Richard's question.

"…very few sightings have been recorded in modern history," he was saying. "The vanarx, as you can imagine, is not a popular animal with Yeerks, and the early Gedd-Controllers hunted it with such ferocity that they were long believed to be extinct.

"That ties into the answer to your question, Anifal," he added. "By the time Andalites arrived on the Yeerk homeworld, vanarges weren't exactly popping out from behind every _Lissik_ bush. In practical terms, the only way Prince Seerow would have learned about them would have been from old Yeerkish folk tales, which seems to be one of the many things he never got around to covering with them.

"In fact," he said, "even the Andalites who caught the vanarges at Gellioss don't know what they are. As far as they know, they're just a pair of curious-looking local animals."

"Chester," Josh said, "this is all well and good, but since we don't have a starship…"

"But you do," said Chester. "Remember those trees the Ssstram flew off in? The Chee have been working on the one they left behind, and we think we've figured out the basics of how to fly it."

Richard blinked. "How did you do that?" he said. "The Ssstram are… well, the Ssstram."

"Yes," said Chester with no perceptible modesty. "But the Chee are the Chee."

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Anifal's eyes light up, and I knew that he was thinking about using the Ssstram tree to visit the Andalite homeworld. I couldn't blame him - if I had been stranded on another planet for a year, I'd be homesick, too - but I wasn't sure how Josh would feel.

I shrugged. We'd cross that bridge when we came to it.

"So, Chester," Abby said, "you're saying that all we have to do is vanish from home for a few days, leave our rooms in the hands of the Chee (which I promised myself I would never do again), trust our fates to Ssstram technology (which I also promised myself I would never do again), land on the Yeerk homeworld, infiltrate an Andalite military base, acquire an animal that can suck a Yeerk from a host's head, and come back."

Chester nodded. "That's about the size of it," he said, "except for one small complication."

"Oh, just one small complication?" said Abby. "That's good to know. Usually we run into about sixteen complications during a mission, of varying sizes."

Either Chester didn't notice the sarcasm oozing from Abby's voice, or he deliberately chose to ignore it. "The one complication," he said, "involves the climate on the Yeerk homeworld."

"What's wrong with the climate on the Yeerk homeworld?" Josh asked.

"Nothing, if you're adapted to it," said Chester. "But most alien life-forms don't seem to have evolved on a planet where it rains acid every night."

Josh thought about that.

"Yeah, that could conceivably be a problem," he agreed.


	3. Hesitation

That evening, I sat on my bed, petting my cat and thinking about our new plan. That wasn't a good idea, because whenever I think about a plan, I always convince myself that it's going to be awful if the plan succeeds. (My mom never lets me pick a fast-food restaurant, because I can worry for hours about whether Pizza Hut would be less devastated by rejection than Wendy's.)

But tonight I was in a thinking mood, and the Yeerkbane plan was the obvious thing to think about, so I thought about it.

Acid rain, huh? Just at night, Chester said… but knowing our luck, that's when we'd get there. A human definitely couldn't make it on a planet like that, and I'd never heard of any animal we could morph that would do much better. So that was a problem.

And now that I thought about it, Chester had never said how powerful a vanarx was. (Or if he had, I hadn't been paying attention.) Maybe they were flimsy, stork-type things that a Hork-Bajir could take out with one slash of his wrist. Maybe we were going to all be killed the next time we attacked the Yeerk pool, and the human race would be subjugated for eternity because of our silly scruples about just-war doctrine. Maybe…

__

Get a grip, Elly, I said to myself. _Chester wouldn't give you information just so you could kill yourself. He's your friend. And besides, he's a Chee. If he tried to arrange your death, his hard drive would freeze up or something._

And anyway, even if the vanarges were wimpy, Josh could find some clever way to get around that. Maybe two of us would go in as vanarges while the other three covered in battle morph.

Whatever, let's say we could do it. We could go into the Yeerk pool and just start sucking Yeerks right out of heads. Then what? What does a Hork-Bajir do on Earth if it's not fighting for Visser and country? I wasn't sure, but I was guessing either, "get captured and infested again" or "get shot": probably the second one, given my experience with bounty hunters.

Or would we only free the human hosts? That wouldn't sit very well with Richard, given his passion for all things alien; Anifal and the Chee wouldn't like it very much, either; and, when I remembered what I'd seen of real Hork-Bajir, I wasn't too keen on it myself.

I sighed, rolled over, and stared at the cat in front of me. "Well, what do you think, Lapkin?" I asked him.

He didn't answer, of course. He's a smart cat, but not that smart. (I should know. I've been him.)

"Well?" I said. "How are we going to make it in Yeerk World? Think there's some kind of mudskipper or something that can survive acid rain?"

Lapkin yawned.

I giggled. "A thousand thanks, O Wise One."

"So," said a voice at my door, "the truth comes out."

I jumped, whirled around. Josh was standing in my doorway, grinning broadly.

"So this is where our intelligence reports have been coming from," he said. "From the great oracle Lapkin-Tapkin." He shook his head. "Suddenly, the last thirteen months make perfect sense."

I laughed shakily. "For a minute there, I thought Daddy had been listening in on me," I said. "I was thinking, _not now, God, I'm not ready to commit parricide for the good of all mankind._"

It wasn't much of a joke, but Josh smiled. "Well, that's good," he said.

He sat down on the bed next to me, and Lapkin-Tapkin, sensing that he wasn't going to have my undivided attention anymore, jumped down to the floor and left the room.

"So," I said, "how _are_ we going to make it in Yeerk World?"

"Actually, I had an idea about that," said Josh. "It's a little risky, but it ought to work okay."

"Shoot."

Josh cleared his throat, and I could see him going into General Pershing mode. "Well, if we arrive during the day there's no problem, but let's say we arrive at night. Obviously, we could wait in orbit while the planet rotated and then go down; but I gather from Anifal that the Andalites watch the Yeerk homeworld pretty closely, so that might leave us vulnerable to attack by one of their patrol ships. Since Chester can't fight, and none of the rest of us know how the ship's weapons system works, that would leave us in a pretty rotten defensive situation."

"And since the Andalites are the good guys," I added, "we don't really want to be shooting them anyway."

"Right. So that's out. Option two: we land on the planet, and just wait till morning to leave the ship. That's a little better situation, but we don't know what kind of bacteria or insects they have on the Yeerk homeworld, and I'd hate for the Morph Force to be obliterated because the Ssstram ship wasn't filtered well enough. Option three: we have Chester go out and get the vanarx for us."

"Are the Chee invulnerable to acid rain?" I interrupted.

"I wasn't sure," said Josh, "but I thought it was a possibility, so I called Chester up and asked him – in our standard the-phone-might-be-tapped-so-we'd-better-be-real-subtle fashion, of course. He said no, so option three isn't an option at all. That leaves option four."

"Option four: we morph something," I said.

"Bingo."  


"Well, that's always fine with me," I said, "but what do we morph?"

Josh's eyes gleamed, the way they do when he's about to share a brilliant scheme. "Okay," he said. "Follow me closely here. We can't survive on a planet where it rains acid, because we've never had to. Earth may have a lot of faults, but that's not one of them. If something wanted to live on the Yeerk homeworld, however, it would have to be able to survive the planet's nightly downpour. Now what kind of animal originated on the Yeerk homeworld, yet is found in large quantities on Earth?"

I gaped at him. "You expect us to morph _Yeerks_?"

Josh grinned. "I knew you'd fall for it," he said. "No, we couldn't do Yeerks, if only because they can't travel very well in their natural form. I was thinking of Gedds."

I blinked. "Gedds? Those funny, ape-like things with the legs that don't match?"

"Right. Remember, they were the Yeerks' original hosts, back when they lived on the homeworld; and there's plenty of them around the Yeerk outposts, mopping floors and stuff."

That was true. Gedds were pretty useless for most purposes, so only the lowest-ranking Yeerks used them as bodies. A Gedd-Controller would be a lousy fighter, he'd be completely inexperienced, and since nobody the Yeerks know wants to be a Gedd, he'd never guess what we were up to. He'd be the easiest thing in the world to capture.

It's hard to explain how I felt at that point. I was pretty sure, now, that we could acquire the vanarges; and I really did want that to happen, despite all my worries about the Hork-Bajir and stuff. There was no reason we shouldn't do this mission. I knew that.

And yet… some basic, emotional, feminine part of me just wasn't convinced. Maybe it was the idea of leaving Earth, maybe it was knowing that the whole war was about to change, or maybe it was something that I don't even have words for, but part of me just needed comforting, and not in words. I needed somebody who would sit down and just hold me for about half an hour.

But I didn't have anybody like that. Mommy and Daddy wouldn't understand why I needed it, and my brother… well, he was Pershing.

So I just smiled at Josh and said, "Yeah, that ought to work."

"I knew you'd like it," he said. "Probably we'll leave around two p.m. on Monday. That ought to give the Chee time to straighten out their affairs, so they can pretend to be us while we're gone."

That seemed to be everything he wanted to say, and after an awkward pause he got up and left the room.

I sat staring at the ceiling for a minute or two, then sighed and put on a CD – a bunch of those mushy country songs, where everybody has true love and nobody has an emotional dilemma involving Gedds. It was a little comforting.


	4. Capture

Maybe you think it's exciting to be me. Maybe you think that if you could turn into any animal you touched, you'd never be bored again. Let me tell you: There is nothing more boring than sitting in a tree in clouded leopard morph, waiting for a buffalo to attack a sewage treatment plant.

I mean, I couldn't bring a book to read, because I couldn't turn the pages without tearing them to shreds. I couldn't get up and move around, because if a Controller saw a clouded leopard outside their major sulp niar refinery, he'd shoot it without thinking twice. I couldn't talk to anyone, because my only ally within thought-speak distance was Anifal, and Andalites are lousy at making conversation. (I once tried asking Anifal what he thought of President Bush. What I got was a fifteen-minute assessment of the odds that he was a Controller.)

So what I wound up doing was a game Josh and I invented called Take One, where you change one letter of a movie title, then give the other person a clue to the new title: for instance, "Polaris is her guardian" would be _Star Ward_. It's a pretty silly game, and sometimes downright stupid; but right then, I didn't think that was a bad thing.

«_Binding Nemo_,» I mused aloud, making sure that no one else could hear my thought-speak. «How Marlin could make sure he doesn't leave the reef… no, that won't work. _Finding Demo_… the Ask Jeeves beta test… that doesn't even make sense. _Finding Nero_… "Rome is burning! Get a fiddler!"»

As you might have guessed, I'm not the all-time Take One champion. That would be Abby, who, the one time she played, came up with "What occurs when they stop saying 'Om'". (No, I'm not going to tell you the answer.) With me, it's usually all I can do to come up with a coherent title, let alone a decent clue.

Fortunately, before I could spend much more time babbling to myself, I heard Richard's voice in my head say, «Okay, Elly, get ready to rumble.»

Obediently, I coiled myself into a springing position and waited for the telltale sounds of combat, which started a few seconds later with the _crash!_ of a metal door being bashed off its hinges. Then came the shrieking Gedds, the blazing Dracon beams, and the sound of delicate equipment being smashed by an angry cow.

I hesitated a few seconds, waiting for Richard to drive the chaos level up just a little higher, and then ran down the branch and leaped through the window.

At the time, it seemed pretty stupid of the Yeerks to have windows in a top-secret facility, but I guess they reasoned that they were high enough off the ground that nobody would peek in and see the Gedds shuffling around. (Nobody without a chickadee morph, anyway.) Plus, I found out later that Gedds really like sunlight, so they probably made it a condition of the job.

Anyway, there was a window there. Not glass, but some kind of 29th-century Plexiglas. Pretty tough stuff. Probably there was no way in the world to break it.

So when a 500-pound clouded leopard hit it at five miles an hour, it did the only thing it could do. It popped completely out of the wall, whistled through the air, and hit a Hork-Bajir square on the beak, while the clouded leopard tumbled to the floor.

The first thing that struck me about the inside of the refinery was how utterly alien it looked. I mean, I've been inside the Yeerk pool, and you wouldn't think it could get more alien than that – but even in the Yeerk pool, there's a few humans walking around, and there's a cafeteria and stuff. Here, though, you had everything: giant reptilian security guards; lime-green, wrinkled creatures shuffling around; and huge steel vats bubbling with strange, alien chemicals.

And the smell! I was in clouded leopard morph, and the clouded leopard knew every smell in the world. The clouded leopard had no idea what to make of this smell, which was asphalt mixed with Pine Fresh mixed with a couple things I didn't even want to think about. Whatever the Yeerks do to sulp niar to get the nutrients back in it, it probably isn't worth the effort.

There was one thing in the room, though, that didn't look at all futuristic or alien. That was the Cape buffalo charging around near the door, goring Hork-Bajir and trampling Gedds.

I think Richard's the only one of us who sees morphing as being about changing yourself. When the rest of us acquired our battle morphs, we picked animals that were somehow like us – sort of like totems, I guess. For example, when I told Josh I'd acquired a clouded leopard, he said, "Sure, that makes sense. Something that spends most of its time keeping quiet and staying out of sight, but can tear people to shreds when it wants to. What else could you be?"

Then there's Abby, who's all about drama and art and bright colors; she's a coral snake. Anifal, who's never been quite at home on Earth, uses some Andalite-homeworld creature called a _sharbat_. And Josh, of course, couldn't be anything but a lion.

Richard, though… well, I would never want to be rude about a friend and fellow warrior, but frankly, Richard is a scrawny geek. You know the kind – can't open a new jug of apple juice, but knows the plot and cast of every _Star Trek_ episode ever made. I'm not sure what kind of battle morph I would have picked for him, but it definitely wouldn't have been the bovine pile driver that was currently distracting the Hork-Bajir for me.

I spent maybe four seconds thinking all this, and then I went into action. The clouded leopard's mind took over and I examined the panicking Gedds, identifying in a split second the strongest, healthiest DNA pattern in the crowd.

I pounced.

The Gedd struggled, of course, but he didn't really have a chance. He could have been the toughest Gedd in the universe, and he still wouldn't have been a match for a clouded leopard. In ten seconds, I had him by the neck and practically unconscious, with blue blood oozing from the wound on his neck.

Now the problem was how to get out of the room with the Gedd. I really didn't want to have to go through the actual sewage-treatment part of the building, because that would mean that a lot of innocent people would get a good glimpse of an alien life-form, and would become either Controllers or dead as soon as the Yeerk leadership heard about it. On the other hand, the window that I had come in through was fifteen feet off the ground, which is a pretty high jump for a clouded leopard, so unless I could find some kind of platform…

«Elly!» Richard called. «Try using the elevator!»

I glanced around. Right next to each of the vats was a small hovering platform, probably used by the Gedds when they needed to pour detergents or something into the sulp niar.

«Oh, yeah,» I said, mentally kicking myself.

I leaped onto the platform nearest to the window and looked around for controls. The only thing that looked right was a bright green button on a nearby console, so I pressed it with my nose.

«Aaaaah!»

Suddenly I was racing upwards at a truly insane speed. I mean, I wasn't going a thousand miles an hour – in fact, I guess I wasn't even going one mile an hour – but I just didn't expect a simple hover-platform to reach the top of a twenty-foot vat in less than a second. I guess Yeerks don't mess around when it comes to their pool fluids.

As soon as I had recovered from the shock, I picked the Gedd back up (I had dropped him during the ride) and coiled into position. I still wasn't perfectly level with the window, but now it was a matter of five feet down rather than fifteen feet up. Even Lapkin could have made that.

Still, I hesitated. If I fiddled with the controls a little bit, maybe I could get it to line up just right. After all, with a mission like this, I shouldn't be taking chances…

TSSSSEEEEEWWWW!

One of the Hork-Bajir guards had managed to evade Richard's horns just long enough to fire a Dracon beam in my direction. It missed my tail by inches, hit an area of the wall just above the window, and sent a chunk of it sizzling to the ground.

That about made my mind up. I tossed the moaning Gedd onto my neck, aligned myself with the window, and leaped out into the open air.


	5. Acquisition

One of the nice things about having a feline battle morph is that you never have to ask yourself, "What if I break my neck jumping off this thirty-foot-high ledge?" There's that wonderful sense of balance that a cat's brain has; the utter certainty that your feet are _here_, and the ground is _there_, and the two are definitely going to intersect. You can take a running leap out of a fourth-story window and suffer no ill effects, aside from your paws stinging and the Gedd in your mouth fainting completely.

«Anifal!» I called as I ran towards the forest. «I've got the Gedd!»

«Excellent,» he said. «Head northwest. I will be with you shortly.»

I hesitated. «Northwest?»

Anifal sighed, probably wondering how he ever managed to get hooked up with a species that doesn't carry a compass around in its head. «Travel away from the sulp niar refinery at a bearing of approximately +30 degrees,» he said, «and you will be heading northwest.»

«Plus 30 degrees,» I repeated. «That's one o'clock, right?»

«If you prefer,» said Anifal patiently.

«Richard!» I yelled. «When you leave the plant, head towards one o'clock!»

«You mean plus 30 degrees?» he said.

I rolled my eyes. «Yeah. Plus thirty degrees.»

«Great.»

I turned tail and headed northwest.

* * *

By the time I had reached the creek where I was supposed to meet Anifal, the Gedd was partially conscious again. At least, he was conscious enough to squeal loudly and try to squirm out of my mouth when he saw an Andalite standing in front of him.

There was a little bit of a smirk in Anifal's eyes when he saw that. I think that he kind of enjoyed being taken for a lethal and menacing Andalite warrior, instead of the cadet he really was.

«Good day, Master Yeerk,» he said, bowing the upper half of his body ironically.

«Anifal,» I said privately, dropping the Gedd onto the ground, «just bop him and let's get this over with.»

Anifal looked a little miffed at my ruining his moment, but said, «Very well, then,» and hit the Gedd on the head with the flat part of his tail-blade. Our hostage dropped like a sack of potatoes.

«I wonder if he's going to ask the Visser for a raise after this,» I commented as I started to demorph.

«Unlikely,» said Anifal. He put his hand on the Gedd's longer leg and began to acquire its DNA. «In the first place, having already been through one emotionally traumatizing experience, he will likely not want to seek out another. In the second place, Visser Seven does not oversee financial remuneration for sulp-niar-refinery workers.»

I'm never sure whether Anifal's being ironic when he says things like that, or whether he just thinks he needs to state the obvious for the benefit of us fuzzy-minded humans. Whatever, it's annoying.

«And in the third place,» said a new thought-speak voice, «with all the blood coming out of that guy's throat, I don't think he's going to live long enough to be asking the Visser for anything.»

I turned around with my almost-human head and saw two identical chickadees sitting on the ground behind me. (And when I say identical, I mean it. I caught the chickadee that they were both identical to.)

"Well, I'm sorry," I said defensively. "When you have Hork-Bajir shooting at you, buffaloes bellowing at you, and crazy platforms shooting up underneath you at a gazillion miles an hour, it's a little hard to calculate how deep you need to sink your teeth into a Gedd's throat."

«Of course it is,» Josh agreed. «You want to acquire him now?»

Without even deigning to answer, I put my hand on the Gedd's arm, concentrated with all my might on his green, wrinkled body, and felt that twisted, ridiculous form become a part of me.

Josh glanced up toward the southeast, looking a little nervous. «I hope Richard didn't get into too much trouble in there,» he said. «If it were Abby I wouldn't worry so much, but…»

«I love you too, Josh,» said Abby.

Josh glared at her. «You know what I mean,» he said. «If the Yeerks caught you in battle morph, at least they couldn't infest you, because the coral snake's brain isn't big enough. A buffalo, though…»

«Talking about me?»

A white-and-gray mockingbird flew into the clearing, looking even cockier than mockingbirds generally look. Any second I expected him to say, «Oh, the cleverness of me!»

Josh let out a breath. «You made it, then.»

«Naturally,» said Richard. «The Hork-Bajir hasn't been born that can outsmart Buffalo Rick.»

Which is pretty much the same thing.

Still, I was impressed. "How'd you get out of there?" I asked.

«Simple. I took two seconds out and punctured the nearest sulp niar vat. Next thing I knew, practically every Yeerk in the place was scrambling to be the first one to plug the hole and save the populace, and only two Hork-Bajir were left behind to chase after me.»

«Two Hork-Bajir,» said Abby. «Against a Cape buffalo.»

«Don't underestimate them,» said Richard. «Those guys were good. I was nervous for all of two seconds.»

Anifal coughed lightly. «Pardon me,» he said, «but if the Yeerks follow Elly's trail to this clearing before we have left, we will all be much worse than nervous for much longer than two seconds.»

The three songbirds looked at each other.

«Good point,» they said simultaneously, and started to demorph.

* * *

Five minutes later we all had Gedd morphs, and were all flying back to the Ssstram ship.

We weren't all flying together, of course. Five songbirds of three different species, all flying in formation, would look pretty suspicious to any competent bird-watcher, so we had agreed to split up into three groups. Abby was flying by herself, Josh was guiding Richard to the ship's hiding place, and Anifal was taking me. And I, of course, was having a ball.

It wasn't so much the flying, although sailing through the air with your own wings is pretty cool. For me, though, there's an intrinsic wonder in the whole idea of morphing – in being yourself, and yet something else. A chickadee, a camel, a ladybug, a Hork-Bajir… you can be anything, live any life, that God ever programmed a DNA strand for – and yet you're still Elly, still the quiet girl who reads too much and wants to be a nun.

Every so often, I'll just stand in front of my bedroom mirror and think: _All I can see there is a twelve-year-old girl with dirty-blond hair and glasses… but really there's a clouded leopard in this room, and a goldfish, and a termite, and a giant bird from the Eocene. I carry them all around with me, and unless I throw them away myself I can't be separated from them… and yet I'm still just a twelve-year-old girl with dirty-blond hair and glasses. What a strange, wonderful thing._

So I was in morph, and I was happy about that. Still, though, there was that nagging worry at the back of my mind, the feeling that something big, something life-changing, was about to happen, and that I just wasn't ready for it.

Of course, the Morph Force couldn't afford for me to think about that. If I thought about it long enough, I'd eventually desert the mission, run home and hide under my bed. So, for lack of a better distraction, I started wrenching my thoughts back to the Take One clue I had been trying to form earlier.

«Hey,» I said aloud. «What about _Funding Nemo_? As in contributing to the Nautilus Research and Development Project.»

Anifal's eyes darted in my direction. He's never played Take One, so he had no idea what I was talking about, but he managed to pretty well grasp what I was saying.

«You're nervous,» he said.

I hesitated. «Well… yeah, I guess so.»

Anifal nodded. «I understand,» he said. «I felt the same way when I first left my homeworld.» Then he hesitated. «Though it must, of course, be far worse for you, since I left for a friendly world, while you are going to the birthplace of the enemy.»

I shook my head. «It's not just that,» I said. «It's… it's more about not knowing what's going to happen next. Doing what you have to do, without knowing whether it'll be good or bad.» If I had been human, I would have blushed. «The fear of the unknown, I guess. It's silly, but…»

«Do not be embarrassed,» said Anifal. «It is very human to feel that way.»

There wasn't much I could say to that.

"Ah, there you two are," said a voice, and the hologram of nondescript forest vanished to reveal Chester standing in front of the bizarre Ssstram ship.

"The others are already in there," he added. "All you have to do is flutter inside and demorph, and this fine specimen of starcraft can start heading for the Acid Realms."

«Excellent,» said Anifal.

«You did remember to bring a change of clothes, right?» I asked anxiously.

Chester rolled his eyes. "Yes, Elly," he said. "We know how you feel about your morphing costume; you won't have to spend three days wearing a 'puke-colored leotard'."

Thus assured, we flew through the ship's entrance hatch and started our journey to the world where the war began.


	6. Voyage

You know how, in the movies, space travel looks like this wonderfully exciting thing, with enemy starships, wayward meteors, and sentient energy beings lurking behind every patch of dark matter? Well, maybe that's how it was when the Andalites first invented it, but now it's more like an extremely long airplane ride.

Of course, our choice of ship didn't make it any easier. The Ssstram are only about three and a half feet long from beak to tail, so a ship built for three of them isn't exactly ideal for four humans, an Andalite, and a Chee. The only thing that kept us sane was that the Ssstram are an aerial species, and they need some space to fly around in. Still, Anifal, in particular, was not happy.

«This is ridiculous,» he muttered at one point, while the six of us were gathered around Chester's holographic Chinese-checkers board. «No sentient being ought to live like this. How can the soul be free when the body inhabits a dungeon?»

"Oh, stop being such an Andalite, Anifal," Josh said. "You've survived Visser Seven's _Ricogwa_ morph; you can survive four days without a grassland habitat. Abby, it's your turn."

"This really is amazing, Chester, you know that?" said Abby, picking up one of her orange marbles and stroking it with a pinkie finger. "The detail you guys put into your holograms, I mean. There's this little streak of white in this marble; of course marbles get discolored, but you don't expect a hologram to exhibit that level of realism."

Anifal looked at her blankly. «Of course the Chee's holograms are realistic,» he said. «The Chee could not have concealed themselves on Earth for five millennia if their holograms were not realistic.»

Abby sighed. "Yes, Anifal, I'm aware of that," she said. "I'm just saying it's impressive."

"I don't know why he can't do it with other games, though," I complained. "I've spent the last two days getting trounced by you guys; it'd be nice if we could play a game that I'm actually good at for a change."

"Elly," said Chester, a little irritably, "we've been over all this. All the games you're good at involve some kind of random element, like dice or cards, and there's no randomizing factor in my programming. If I projected a Snakes and Ladders board for you, I'd have to control the dice myself, and sooner or later you'd be rolling the numbers I thought you deserved. Is that what you want?"

"Well, no," I admitted.

"Okay, then," said Chester. "I'm sorry, believe me. The last thing I want is to cause a sentient being distress."

"You know, Chester," said Richard, "you keep telling us all this stuff about not being able to harm a sentient being, but I'm starting to wonder if you mean it. Abby, have you moved yet?"

"Um... yeah," said Abby hastily, putting her marble down in front of Chester's home base.

"What do you mean, you're not sure I mean it?" Chester demanded of Richard. "All those lousy Data jokes I've heard in the last nine months? Any android that could harm a sentient being would have long since crushed your skull in by now."

"Mm," said Richard, his eyes scanning the board. "Then how come you not only have told us about a morph we can use to eat Yeerks, but are actually driving us to a place where we can acquire some?"

"Because," said Chester, "if I don't tell you, you'll wind up killing Yeerks anyway; only, without the vanarx morph, you'll also kill their hosts. Therefore, by taking you to Gellioss, I'm preventing the destruction of sentient beings – and if I can't do that, what can I do?"

"Ah-ha," said Richard, moving a yellow marble across two of my purple ones. "So, you don't have randomization circuits, but you definitely have rationalization circuits."

Chester disdained to reply, and for the next few minutes the six of us played in silence.

It was basically a game between Josh and Richard, both of whom are outstanding Chinese-checker players. Anifal's usually pretty good, too, but being cooped up in the Ssstram ship was freaking him out so badly that he was playing more at Abby's level, which is okay, but not great. Chester, being a robot, could probably have blown all of us away, except that he wasn't so much interested in winning as in preventing both Josh and Richard from doing so. And I was just plain awful.

Partly, of course, that was because I'm no good at strategy games. I never know what move to make first – or second, or third – and by the time I've actually figured out what I need to do, I'm doomed anyway, so why bother?

This time, though, there was something else. Something I hadn't done yet was nagging at me to do it, and so much of my brain was either dwelling on it or trying to ignore it that I could barely even think about the game at all. Basically, when it was my turn, I just grabbed whichever purple marble was closest to me, put it somewhere else, and said, "Your turn, Josh."

"Elly," said Josh, after my third or fourth move like this, "you just jumped over two empty spaces."

I was so distracted by that point that it took me a few seconds to realize what he meant. "Oh, yeah," I said, moving my marble back to a legal spot. "Sorry."

Josh sighed. "You know, Elly," he said, "if you were playing opposite Abby, I wouldn't mind so much; but when I'm trying to crush Richard, I'd prefer you to at least pretend to be keeping him out of your home base."

"What makes you think she isn't?" said Richard. "So far, she's only moved five marbles. I can't possibly win if she keeps that up."

I felt a little guilty at that. I mean, maybe I didn't care about the game, but I didn't want other people to suffer for my thoughtlessness – especially not Josh. Clearly, I needed to get my brain back in gear; and that meant dealing with the other thing.

"All right, all right, I'm sorry," I said. "Listen, do you mind if I use the bathroom?"

Josh didn't answer, but kept staring at the board with that intense look he gets whenever there's a problem he has to solve. I'd seen that look so many times in the past year (with reference to Hork-Bajir uprisings and newly appointed Vissers) that it was almost jarring to see it now, when his only problem was how to work around his sister's inept placement of marbles.

Taking that as a no, I stood up, brushed the dust from the floor off my skirt, and headed for the back part of the ship.

* * *

I was the only person on the ship who still used the Ssstram bathroom. Since the ceiling was only four and a half feet off the floor, all the other Morph Forcers understandably preferred to take some of the disposable thermos bottles from the ship's kitchen into their quarters, take care of their business that way, and then eject the bottles into Z-space. Since I'm only four foot seven anyway, though, it wasn't so much of a problem for me.

See, the Ssstram have this thing about bodily fluids. Anything that involves getting up close and personal with them is considered utterly repulsive, to be done only when you have to. (I don't know what they'd do if they saw a Dracula film. Kill themselves, probably.) So not only do they waste as little space as possible on their ship's bathrooms, but they also make the walls three feet thick and soundproof, and paint the entire room in some bizarre green-and-orange pattern that supposedly inhibits telepathy. Basically, if you're in an Ssstram bathroom, there is zero chance that anybody outside is going to know anything about it.

Considering what I was about to do, that was probably a good thing.

It wasn't so much that we weren't allowed to do stuff like this. Josh had never actually said anything about it, but whenever he caught me at it in my bedroom, he got this look on his face that made me feel horribly guilty, like I was getting ready to go tell Visser Seven my telephone number. So, in general, I tried to avoid it.

But still… I mean, I'd acquired the Gedd three days ago, and I still hadn't used it. For me, that was an astonishing amount of self-control. Surely, Josh would understand if I gave in now… if he ever found out, that is.

Hastily, I pulled off my glasses, blouse, and skirt, leaving only my leotard. Then I closed my eyes, focused on the Gedd inside me, and started to morph.


	7. Morph

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Morphing is a wonderful thing. The idea of being yourself, and yet something else; the release from the tedium of the human body; all the feelings, sensations, and perceptions that no human can ever know… all of it, it's just marvelous. Morphing power is one of the greatest gifts that technology has ever bestowed on sentient beings.

Of course, so is heart surgery. That doesn't mean that the process is pretty.

Since I had my eyes closed, I felt the changes before I saw them. There was that bizarre sensation of the Andalite pain-killer spreading throughout my body, numbing me to the massive deformations that I was about to inflict on it. Then my skin started expanding, loosening, becoming about three times too large for my four-and-a-half-foot body, flopping down on top of itself in the trademark Gedd wrinkles. It felt colder, too – clammy, spongy… all in all, pretty repulsive.

My hair snaked back into my head, and short, wiry hairs started to emerge all over my body. Then came the teeth. I suppose that made some kind of sense – skin, hair, then teeth – but all the same, it was pretty unnerving to feel these pointy little Gedd incisors erupting out of still-basically-human gums. It was a good reminder of why I'm afraid of dentists.

Then, suddenly… WHUMP!

I lost my balance and hit my jaw on the crystal Ssstram floor. Apparently, my left leg had decided that now would be a good time to shrink to about three-quarters of the length of my right leg, and down I went.

The shock made me open my eyes, and I caught a glimpse of my left hand. I've always been a little vain about my hands, so it was kind of jarring to see one of them covered in wrinkly, pale-purple skin, with webs growing out from between the fingers like some mutant form of athlete's foot.

"Rrr-so, arrre we having-rrr fun yet?" I muttered to myself, as my vocal cords made the transition to Gedd level.

The changes were happening fast now. My bones jelled and shifted, changing from solid keratin into the more flexible, half-cartilage stuff popular on the Yeerk homeworld. My senses shifted; smell was noticeably better, hearing a touch worse, and sight virtually unchanged. (Bear in mind that I wasn't wearing my glasses at the time, so we're not talking about an eagle-eyed species here.)

Finally, after about a minute and a quarter, the last human portion of my anatomy (a portion that I have no intention of discussing, thank you very much) changed to its Gedd equivalent. The morph was finished; all that was left now was to wait for the instincts to emerge.

This was really the important part for me. When you morph an animal, you don't just borrow its body for two hours; you also experience all of its most basic needs and hungers, and, depending on what kind of animal it is, that experience can be anything from a sublime joy to a screaming terror. (You think you've been psychologically disturbed? Once you've wanted to eat your own brother, then we'll talk.)

The thing was, all the other morphs I'd ever done had been Earth animals. I had no idea what a set of completely alien instincts would be like, and it was the desire to know that, more than any fascination with the Gedd body, that had been nagging at me during the Chinese checkers game.

So I waited, my heart pounding in my abdomen, until the instincts of the Gedd came bubbling up from their subterranean dwelling, and this is what I felt:

I felt like eating some seaweed.

That was it. I couldn't believe it at first; I thought my long experience with morphing was getting the better of me, and I was instinctively blocking out the Gedd's more violent passions. After all, these were the original Yeerk hosts, the proto-Hork-Bajir. Surely the Hork-Bajir's resistance to their captivity should be multiplied tenfold in this species, right?

But no. I dug a little deeper into the Gedd's consciousness, hoping to find something resembling a strong, alien instinct; nothing. I had spent three days being driven nearly insane by the desire to morph a complete lump.

Disgusted, I demorphed, flushed an empty waste-disposal capsule out of the ship for appearance's sake, and headed back to the game.

* * *

"A-ha," said Abby as I entered the command bay. "The Princess emergeth."

"Sorry," I said, slipping back into my chair. "Am I holding up the game?"

"Actually, no," said Abby. "Chester is." She jerked her head to the control panel, where an uncloaked Chee was staring at a 3-D viewscreen.

I blinked. "What's he doing?"

"We're not sure," said Josh. "Apparently his connection to the Ssstram ship alerted him to some kind of funny reading or something."

I was a little nervous at that. It hadn't really crossed my mind to wonder what kind of sensors the Ssstram ship had; had Chester noticed some kind of energy spike when I morphed?

Chester must have heard us talking, because at that point he glanced up from his instruments. I think he looked puzzled, although it's not always easy to tell on his android face. "Elly, you flushed a capsule when you went to the bathroom, right?"

"Um… yeah," I said, feeling proud that I had remembered to do that. "Shouldn't I have?"

"Of course, you should have," said Chester irritably, "and according to the ship's function log, you did, about 32.8 seconds ago; but then I should be seeing it in the immediate vicinity, and none of the ship's sensors are picking up a thing."

"Oh." I turned that statement over in my head, but couldn't find anything that might be related to morphing. "Well, that's weird."

"Yeah, just a little," said Chester. He scrutinized the viewscreen for a few more minutes; then he shrugged, turned, and came back to the game board. "Oh, well, I don't suppose it's a big deal."

"Nah," said Richard. "Just the fabled Z-Space Dragons ravening upon Elly's waste products."

"Conceivably," said Chester, with the air of someone being extremely tolerant of an idiot. "Or these Ssstram instruments could just be fritzing out again. Lord knows, it wouldn't be the first time." He sighed and reactivated his hologram. "Anyway, I wouldn't worry about it; it's probably nothing."

Abby snorted. "You haven't been with the Morph Force very long, have you, Chester?" she said. "It's _always_ something."


	8. Arrival

If it had just been the one canister, I doubt any of us would ever have thought about it again; but, as Abby had pointed out, life as a Morph Forcer is never that simple. For the next fifteen hours, whenever any of us ejected a waste-disposal canister, it promptly disappeared into the white, misty reaches of Z-space.

The trouble was, none of us could think of any reason to be alarmed by this, but we all felt that we ought to be alarmed. Maybe it was our native Morph-Forcer paranoia surfacing, or maybe we were just desperate for something to do, but those disappearing canisters quickly became the focus of all our creative energies.

Chester held tight to his theory that the Ssstram sensors had gone weird, although I think that was more an excuse to whine about Ssstram technology than an actual belief. Anifal formed an elaborate hypothesis about us being caught in the middle of a Z-space rift, so that any objects below a certain mass would just sort of fold in on themselves. Josh, always the conscientious leader, refused to speculate on the subject, preferring instead to deal with the repercussions of the phenomenon when they came. Richard, for reasons of his own, kept blathering about Z-Space Dragons – aided and abetted by Abby, who managed, in less than twenty-four hours, to develop the most exhaustive mythological structure since the _Silmarillion_.

As for me, I mostly kept quiet. I knew, of course, that there was no logical reason why my morphing the Gedd should cause canisters to disappear; but, all the same, I didn't trust myself, if I got into a serious conversation about the whole thing, not to blurt out something like, "Well, I don't suppose morphing could have anything to do with it, could it?" And, of course, the others would wonder where that had come from, and there'd be all kinds of uncomfortable questions, and… well, let's just say it wouldn't be fun. So I just stayed out of it.

So with me staying away, Josh reserving judgment, and Richard and Abby off in their own little world, there were really only two people even trying to figure out what was going on, so I suppose it's not surprising that we hadn't come to any real conclusions by the time we emerged from Z-space.

It happened on the morning of our third day. We were at the Chinese checkers board again, except this time only Josh and Richard were playing, the rest of us having decided that we were just getting in their way. Josh had just managed to insinuate his first marble into Richard's home base, resulting in a growl from Richard and cheers from the rest of us, when a light on the ship's console started blinking on and off. Chester went over to it, looked at the screen for a few moments, then nodded and turned to us.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "in just a few minutes we will be emerging from Z-space. Please make sure your seats are in upright positions, and thank you for not smoking."

"Upright relative to what?" said Richard. "We're in space."

The rest of us, however, got up and ran to the main window, eager to see the shift when it happened. For a few minutes, the milky whiteness of Z-space drifted lazily by, changeless, eternal, and utterly boring; then there was a _beep_ from Chester's console, and it was like someone had flipped a switch and turned on the universe.

The milky-white nothingness was replaced by a rich, velvet-black carpet sprinkled with stars. _Stars._ You think you know what stars look like because you visited your relatives in the country once? You haven't seen anything until you've stared out a starship porthole, two inches of air and some perfect-transparency alien material all that stood between you and twenty thousand suns spread out over a million million miles.

I heard Abby sigh next to me. "They look so peaceful," she said.

And they did. Maybe in between the stars there were ten thousand restless races, each at its own as well as the others' throats, but the stars didn't know about that, and wouldn't have cared if they had known. Everything is simpler for stars; gravity tells you where to go, and you go. You aren't worried about whether it's right or wrong; there's only one way you can go, and since the universe isn't evil, that way must be right.

Chester's voice interrupted my meditations. "Well," he said, "if peaceful's what you're looking for, don't look out the main viewscreen."

So, naturally, all five of us turned to look out the main viewscreen, and got our first look at the Yeerk homeworld.

It didn't look at all like my idea of a life-supporting planet. The oceans were a dull gray (sulp niar, I guessed), with a few jagged, red-brown continents slicing through them. You didn't tend to notice that, though, because all your attention was drawn to the sky, which was bright green with little bolts of electricity flying through it every few seconds. (At least, they looked little from where we were. They were probably huge when you were right next to them.)

"Well," said Abby. "No wonder the Yeerks are so messed up, living on a planet like that."

"There's some serious energy in that sky," Chester commented. "If the Yeerks had ever developed their own advanced technology, they probably would have wound up living up there, in artificial cities floating on electroweak flux."

"Like 'The Cloud Minders'," Richard offered.

"Basically, only without the Troglytes."

"That may be," said Josh, "but the way things look from here, I'd say someone's already bought up all the real estate."

That was true, and was the other reason why the Yeerk homeworld didn't look peaceful. The planet was laced with thousands upon thousands of Andalite fighters and Dome ships orbiting in perfect synchronization, each with its shredder cannon sticking up behind it like a huge tail, poised and ready to blast any unfamiliar vessel into oblivion.

Richard whistled softly. "Wow," he said. "They must have half the Andalite fleet guarding this place."

«Not quite that many,» said Anifal, «but still a respectable number. Many Andalite warriors live and raise families on those Dome ships, with full support from the homeworld government.»

"Kind of like the Panama Canal Zone," I offered.

«In many respects, yes.»

"Except," Abby put in, "there's no way we'll be able to get through it by saying we're carrying a freight load of soybeans."

«No,» Anifal agreed. «No Andalite commander would conceivably allow an unregistered, alien vessel to pass onto the Yeerk homeworld – and no technology known to Andalites could cloak us from their sensors.»

"Very true," said Chester. "So aren't you lucky to be traveling with a piece of technology unknown to Andalites?"

He snapped his fingers (probably just for dramatic effect), and every window on the ship began to shimmer – like a really hot summer day, except this was in deep space. I'd seen something like it once before, when one of the Chee had smuggled me out of the Yeerk pool. Chester was projecting a hologram all around the Ssstram ship, a hologram that would keep us from being seen by the Andalite fleet.

Grinning, Chester (who now, instead of a boy about my age, looked like a robot dog on two legs) carefully steered the Ssstram ship – a ship the size of my house – through a nearby gap in the biggest, tightest, most technologically advanced blockade in the galaxy.

Nobody paid us the slightest notice. To the Andalites and their sensors, we probably looked like just another patch of vacuum.

Anifal took a deep breath, as though he were swallowing about fifteen years' worth of Andalite-_aristh_ pride. «That was very impressive, Chester,» he said.

"Why, thank you, Anifal," said Chester. "Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen. Next stop: the Yeerk homeworld."

"What's its name?" I asked suddenly. For some reason, this seemed important.

"What's what's name?" Chester asked.

"The Yeerk homeworld."

"What do you mean, what's its name? It's the Yeerk homeworld."

In response to my befuddled look, Anifal stepped forward. «It is the Andalite custom,» he said, «to refer to life-bearing planets simply as the homeworlds of their dominant species. Non-life-bearing planets are generally ignored in the official nomenclature.»

That didn't satisfy me. "Well, what about the Yeerks?" I asked. "What do they call their home planet?"

«I have never inquired,» said Anifal delicately.

"The sun's called Kandrona," Chester offered. "Hence the name of the particles it emits. You could call this place Kandrona-3."

Abby wrinkled her nose. "Ugh, no," she said. "That's what half-witted science-fiction writers do when they've used up all their creativity justifying the warp drive."

Richard bristled, and I could tell he wasn't pleased with this slur upon his favorite genre, but before he could give Abby what for, Josh, who had been staring out at the Yeerk homeworld on the main viewscreen, said, "Apollo."

"Huh?" I said.

"Apollo," Josh repeated. "You're supposed to name planets after Roman gods, right? And for the Yeerks, their sun is just about the most important thing in the universe. So their planet's Apollo."

Chester stared. "You're kidding me, right?" he said. "We're talking about a planet of parasitic slugs where it rains acid every night, and you want to name it after Phoebus Apollo?"

"There's precedent," said Josh. "Look at Saturn. Here you have this truly gorgeous planet, and they went and named it after a monster who ate his own kids. Well, we're doing the same thing, only backward."

Chester stilled looked dubious. Abby looked frustrated that she hadn't thought of it first; Richard looked irritated that we hadn't stuck with Kandrona-3; and Anifal looked annoyed that "the Yeerk homeworld" wasn't good enough for these upstart humans. Just the same, the leader had spoken, and nobody could think of any good reason to argue with him; and so Apollo it became.

That comforted me, somehow. There was all the difference in the world between a place that you thought of only as the home of your enemies and a place that had an actual name – a place that had substance – a place that was itself. It was all right, somehow, to go and fight in a place like that.

Chester sighed. "All right, then," he said. "Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen. Next stop: Apollo."


	9. Landing

We went into low orbit around Apollo, with a little gravitational help from its moon (which Abby had named Phaethon the instant she saw it, glaring at Josh as though daring him to challenge her), and quickly established that the Andalite base we needed to visit was currently on the planet's night-side, which meant that the nightly rains would be doing their thing when we got there.

"See, you two?" Josh said to Richard and me. "Now aren't you glad that we had you risk your lives over a green, wrinkly ape-thing?"

"I don't get it, though," I said. "Why couldn't we just stay in orbit until the planet rotated?"

«Because,» said Anifal, «the Yeerk-homeworld blockade is equipped, among other things, with gravity sensors, and, while Chester's cloaking abilities are unquestionably remarkable, I doubt that he can disguise the Ssstram ship's gravitational pull. It is therefore to our advantage to land before they start noticing such things.»

"Oh."

"Besides, Elly," said Josh, "what are you complaining about? You're going to get to try out a new morph."

My brother knows me altogether too well. There was nothing to do but grin and nod, just as though I hadn't already found out what a flop the Gedd morph was.

Chester took a deep breath. (I'm not sure why an android would need to do that, but maybe it was a reflex habit after five millennia as a human.) "Okay," he said, "now comes the tricky part."

"Listen to the man," said Abby. "He figures out how to run a ship powered by Zen physics; he evades Grabbadil the Fiery and his Z-spatial brood; he slips past the biggest military blockade in the galaxy; and _now_ comes the tricky part."

"Exactly," said Chester. "You're a Catholic, right, Abby?"

"Um, yeah," said Abby.

"Who's the patron saint of entering a seriously electrically charged atmosphere, at speeds of up to Mach 3, in a starship composed of a wood that makes one of the best dang conductors this side of the Magellanic Clouds?"

Abby thought for a moment. "Um… I'll say Pius V."

"Well, start praying to him," said Chester. He threw three switches, and the Ssstram ship turned sharply downward and started rocketing into the Apollic atmosphere.

It was an exciting ride, I have to say. The Ssstram ship groaned and rattled all the way, as though it wasn't built for this sort of thing and might disintegrate at any moment. The bolts of electricity (which turned out, sure enough, to be positively gargantuan when you were right next to them) blazed around us, and would have hit us on at least three occasions if Chester hadn't swerved us out of the way just in time. Then, on the final leg, when we penetrated the planet's cloud cover, the rain started pounding on our hull, adding the suspense element of whether the alien shellac that coated the ship could stand having acid being poured on it for about twenty minutes. The whole thing, taken together, constituted a thrill ride of the first order.

If Josh ever orders me to do it again, I swear I'll mutiny.

Finally, after seventy-five minutes and several hundred prayers (to St. Pius V and just about everyone else), the ship gave a sudden lurch, and we heard a high-pitched whine emerge from the bottom of the ship.

"That's the gravitational compensators getting warmed up," said Chester. "The last step preparatory to landing."

"Oh, good," I said.

The next minute the ship jerked 90 degrees, and I found myself skidding wildly down a floor that had suddenly become a wall. Instinctively, I started morphing to chickadee, but I only managed to grow a few feathers before I rammed into what, up until now, had been the far wall. Within the second, the rest of the Morph Force came skidding down to join me, resulting in assorted bumps, bashes, bruises, and a sudden, stinging pain in my left leg.

"Ow!" I shouted.

Anifal hastily jerked his tail away. «My apologies, Elly,» he said. «I was not anticipating this sudden disorientation.» He directed a four-eyed glare up at Chester, who appeared to have magnetically bonded himself to the console and was now squatting serenely on the ceiling.

"Sorry about that," he said. "I thought you knew. The design of the Ssstram ship requires it to land on its rocket end, so you have to flip it sideways when you want to commence docking maneuvers."

"What?" Abby demanded. "What kind of idiots came up with that system?"

"Winged ones," said Richard.

"Oh." Abby thought about that. "Good point."

While the five of us disentangled ourselves from each other, I snuck a glance at my leg. It wasn't a pretty sight; Anifal's tail blade had sliced my skirt up nearly to my waist, and blood was flowing pretty freely from my thigh onto the deck. It was a good thing he had been disoriented, or he might have turned me into the Space-Faring Maid wi' One Leg.

I stood up, wincing, and shot a look at my brother. "You know, Josh," I said, "once upon a time, you would have been forcibly holding me down and trying to remember how to make a tourniquet right now."

"Hmm?" said Josh, glancing at me. "Oh, I see. Yeah, that does look pretty bad – but then, you're going to be morphing in a few minutes, so there shouldn't be any lasting harm done."

I bit back my reply. Letting my emotions interfere with a mission had gotten me in trouble too many times before. Inwardly, though, I thought, _You know, Josh, you were a much better big brother back when you weren't so good a general. _

"And we have reached the ground," said Chester, detaching from the console and dropping with a thump onto the floor. "If either of you lovely ladies wish to shower me with grateful kisses and tell me how magnificent I am, I promise not to take it amiss."

Neither Abby nor I moved a muscle.

"Oh, well," said Chester. "It was worth a shot."

Josh frowned. "You have a pretty frisky libido for an android, you know that, Chester?" he said.

Chester shrugged. "Spend enough time as a harem overseer for Suleyman the Magnificent, and you start to get a feel for the style," he said.

"Mm," said Josh. "So how far are we from Whatsitsname Andalite Base?"

"Gellioss," said Chester. "It's two miles and a quarter due southwest of here. At a standard Gedd walking pace, that means it'll take you about forty-five minutes to get there."

Josh nodded approvingly. "Good work," he said. "I don't suppose it'll be that hard to find the enclosure, but on the off chance that it is, we might want to…"

My head was starting to swim from loss of blood. "Excuse me, Josh," I said, "but could you continue this conversation after we morph?"

"Oh, of course," said Josh. "Sorry about that."

"Not at all," I managed.

"You heard her, people!" said Josh. "Let's morph!"

* * *

Four minutes later, five identical Gedds were sitting unsteadily on the floor of the Ssstram ship.

"W-rrr-ell, this-rrr-s…" Abby started to say with the Gedd's mouth. She frowned, and switched over to thought-speak. «Well, this is a refreshing change. Nothing hard at all with this morph, except for trying to balance on these stupid legs.»

I glanced down at my own mismatched legs, and caught sight of my dried blood on the floor. The Gedd's color vision wasn't great, but I could still see that part of the patch was blue; apparently my bloodstream had changed before my leg this time around. It was kind of an interesting sight, looking at the contrasts of blue, red, and a sort of purple where it had been in the process of changing, and realizing that all of it was different forms of the same thing. I thought about what Anifal had once said, about how the DNA prints of all the animals we'd ever acquired could be found in our blood, and I wondered what it would look like if you ran a forensic test on this little puddle; if the _CSI_ people got hold of one of the purple spots, would they be able to tell that the person it came from could turn into a hummingbird at a moment's notice?

The sense of Josh's thought-speak "voice" in my mind interrupted my musings. «Hmm?» I said. «I'm sorry, I wasn't listening.»

«I said I'm sorry the morph's such a letdown,» said Josh. «Here you've been waiting eagerly for four or five days to get into this latest species's head, and now it turns out not to be worth getting into. Must be pretty depressing for you.»

I shrugged. «That's okay,» I said. «I guess I should have expected it. The Yeerks have probably been breeding these things to have weak minds for the last few millennia; you can't really expect them to have much in the way of instincts anymore.»

«True,» Josh admitted. «Well, I suppose we'd better be going. We are operating under certain time constraints, after all.»

Since none of us particularly wanted to be stuck as Gedds for the rest of our lives, we all agreed that this was a wise idea, and the five of us hobbled over to the exit hatch.

«Chester?» said Josh. «Care to open this thing for us?»

"Get everyone to cluster around it first," said Chester. "I don't want to drop the force field any sooner than I have to."

«What force field?» I said.

"What do you mean, what force field?" said Chester. "The one that's keeping the acid monsoon off this ship's hull."

I blinked. «You can keep the acid off with a force field?»

"Of course."

«But Josh said he asked you whether you could go get the vanarges for him, and you said no.»

"Actually," said Chester, "what I said was that if he wanted me to risk such a sophisticated piece of machinery as myself to do his job for him, he'd have to pay me my worth in current American dollars."

«Which is?»

"About $12.5 trillion."

«Oh,» I said. «So, basically, you did say no.»

"Basically," Chester agreed. "Now, if the five of you will just lean up against the door there…"

«Wait a minute,» said Richard. «If the control panel is on the ceiling, how are you going to de-energize the exit hatch?»

Chester grinned slyly, which on his robot-dog face was truly a disturbing sight. "I have my methods, Richard, I assure you," he said. "Now, please, everyone, lean."

We did so, and Chester gazed up at the ceiling and raised a single finger. A small, shining bubble – a miniature force field, I suppose – emerged from the tip of his metal claw, drifted up to the control panel, and lazily pushed itself against a greenish-yellow panel.

I don't know what the others had been expecting, but I had assumed that the door would slowly dilate open, or slide into the wall the way the _Star Trek_ doors do. Instead, it just sort of disappeared; one minute it was there, the next minute it wasn't, as though Chester had blown the Last Trump and initiated some kind of door Rapture. (Not that I believe in the Rapture, but I've seen the movies, and I'm telling you, that's what it looked like.)

Predictably, the five of us who had been leaning against it lost our balance and tumbled out of the ship onto the spongy Apollic soil. (Fortunately, Anifal didn't have a tail blade this time.)

As we staggered to our feet, I caught a momentary glimpse of Chester smirking at us through the open exit hatch. Before I could orient my jaw muscles to stick my tongue out at him, he reactivated the hologram; the entire ship shimmered for a moment and then vanished into thin air, and the five of us were alone on the Yeerk homeworld.

As I glanced around the bizarre, alien landscape, I felt a sudden upsurge in the Gedd instincts – still controllable, but stronger than anything I had felt from the morph before. This was home for the Gedd, where it belonged. The crazy-electric sky, the toxic rain, the smell like rotten broccoli emanating from all the nearby vegetable life – to the Gedd's mind, it was all as pleasant, as beautiful, as _right_, as my clouded-leopard morph felt curled up in a tree on a hot summer day.

Josh chuckled. «Anyone else feel that?» he said.

«The "Be it ever so humble" impulse, you mean?» said Richard. «Yeah, I got that. Maybe this trek won't be so arduous, after all.»

«Well, only one way to find out,» said Josh. He pointed towards a faraway range of mountains, all but obscured by the rain. «Southwest is that way, right, Anifal?»

Anifal nodded.

«Then that way we shall go,» said Josh. «Come on, folks. Let's go acquire ourselves some Yeerkbane.»


	10. Apollo

As it turns out, walking as a Gedd isn't nearly as hard as the leg thing makes it look. Basically, you dig the foot of the shorter leg into the ground, swing the longer leg around your body like a sideways pendulum, and then dig that foot into the ground and use it to hoist the shorter leg forward, sort of like a lever. It's a pretty complicated way to walk, and it takes a little while to learn – but then, the way chickadees fly is complicated, too, and you don't hear me complaining about that.

Besides, the Gedd brain knew how to walk like that, even if we didn't, so we managed to get the hang of it in about four minutes (even Anifal, who walks like a drunken stork in his human morph). After that, it was just a matter of making distance and watching the scenery.

When I tell you that making distance was the fun part, that should give you some idea of what the scenery was like.

It took me a while to figure out what was so creepy about Apollo. At first I thought it was just the sheer weirdness of the place, but that wasn't it, or at least not all of it. I'd experienced enough weirdness in the past year to know the difference between weird and spooky, and this place was both.

The problem wasn't the twelve-legged dragonfly-things flying around making wailing noises, or the "trees" whose branches were eight times as long as their trunks, or the giant tongues that came up out of holes in the ground to grab unwary animals that looked like six-legged pigs without heads. The problem was that, as we walked along, all the dragonfly-things were making the same wailing noise, all the mini-trees had exactly the same leaves, and it was always the same kind of tongue that came out to grab the same kind of headless pig-thing. The planet felt like one giant assembly line, and to me – the girl who considers it a bad day when only six species show up at our bird-feeder – that kind of uniformity was scary.

For about the first mile and a half, I kept quiet about it. After a while, though, I felt like I just had to say something, or I was going to go nuts. You know the feeling.

«Well,» I said, trying to sound casual. «Not much for biodiversity, these folks, huh?»

«No,» Anifal said. «Evolution on the Yeerk homeworld works on the principle of conquest rather than coexistence.»

«What's that mean?»

«There is a pattern to Yeerk-homeworld life,» Anifal said. «When an ecological niche opens up, several different species rush to fill it. These species then begin a fierce competition between each other, one that does not cease until one species has totally annihilated all the others. Once this occurs, the successful species begins the task of adapting perfectly to the habitat it has thus appropriated. This generally takes several million years, at the end of which time the niche is very likely to have disappeared or been replaced by a different niche. The species duly goes extinct, and the cycle begins all over again.»

He paused. «It explains a great deal about the Yeerks, really.»

«Wow,» said Richard. «And I thought Earth was a tough neighborhood.»

«It is,» said Anifal firmly. «Much tougher than this world. A life-form on Earth cannot simply battle three or four other species for control of a specialized niche: it must battle all the other species on the planet simply to stay alive. That is why Earth's ecosystem is so varied and subtle. It is why humans adapt so readily to change.» He turned and grinned at us. «It is why the four of you have, in a matter of months, become four of the galaxy's greatest warriors.»

I don't know if Gedds can blush, but I definitely felt a tingle on my cheeks just then.

Or maybe that was just the rain.

«Say,» I said, suddenly remembering. «What's going to happen when we get back to the ship?»

«What do you mean?» said Josh.

«Well, we're going to be dripping with acid, aren't we?» I said. «That can't be good for a delicate machine-organism-whatever like the Ssstram ship. Is Chester going to blow-dry us off before he lets us in, or something?»

Anifal gave me a weird look. «Elly,» he said, as though he couldn't believe how ignorant I was, «the skin of our morph contains a base exactly opposite to the acid in the rains; any acid that touches us is neutralized, no more hazardous than pure water. That is why the Gedd morphs were necessary in the first place. The Ssstram ship cannot possibly be in any danger from us.»

I was a little irritated at Anifal's tone. I'm only in seventh grade, after all; I can't be expected to have learned all of this stuff. (Though to hear Anifal talk, Andalites are probably taught chemistry in kindergarten, so from his perspective I guess I can.)

«Hang on,» said Richard. «Is that really how this morph works?»

«Of course,» said Anifal.

«But acids neutralize bases the same way that bases neutralize acids,» said Richard, «so our protective coating should be vanishing with every raindrop.»

«And so it is,» said Anifal. «Cellular reproduction, however, occurs much more quickly in Gedd skin than it does in any Earthly organ, so the supply of the base – Andalite scientists call it _fiastha_ – is replenished as quickly as it is consumed.»

«Oh.» Richard thought about that. «Is that why the Gedd's skin is so wrinkly?»

«Exactly,» said Anifal, sounding pleased that one of us was catching on. «The excess skin produced must go somewhere, and Gedds are too vulnerable to predators for constant shedding to be practical, so it simply accumulates on the body.

«In fact,» he added, «since swift skin growth is such an important aspect of health in a Gedd, the number and size of wrinkles is a large part of the male's mating display. In the rutting season, a…»

«Oh, _shut up!_»

The four of us turned to stare at Abby, who had been unusually quiet till now.

«Don't any of you realize?» she said. «We're _on another planet_. We've reached out into the great expanse of Elsewhere and found solid ground. We should all be struck dumb with awe right now, and you people are talking about skin cells!»

«Certainly,» said Richard, with that irritating more-rational-than-thou tone he sometimes gets. «Despite what you may have been told, Abby, ignorance is not a prerequisite to aesthetic appreciation. Sometimes, you can when you know something about a place, you can actually appreciate it more.»

Abby glared, but Josh cut her off before she could come up with a reply. «Richard,» he said, «if Abby doesn't want to listen to a biology lecture, she doesn't have to. You and Anifal can chat about Gedd mating displays in private thought-speak, and the rest of us can be alone with our own thoughts.»

That's my brother for you, always the politician. Richard gave him a long-suffering look, the way Galileo probably did when they made him deny the heliocentric theory. Then he turned to Anifal, and I guess they continued their conversation because Anifal shook his head a lot, but the rest of us couldn't hear a thing.

In the silence, I looked around at the landscape and thought about what Abby had said. It was another planet, that was for sure – I've seen pictures of Jupiter that looked more like Earth than this place did – but it sure didn't strike me dumb with awe.

Then again, maybe that was my own prejudice. Maybe if I stopped wanting Apollo to be Earth and just tried to appreciate it for what it was, then the whole cookie-cutter quality of the place would turn out to be as beautiful in its own way as Earth was. I doubted it, but it was worth a try.

So for the next ten minutes or so, I did my best to look at the Apollic scenery as if I'd never walked through an Earthly meadow in July, and I think I had some success, in the sense that I wasn't actively hating the entire ecosystem when Josh said, «Look sharp, folks. Target at ten-o'-clock.»

We all looked up and to our left. About forty yards away, almost hidden in the rain, was a pulsing, yellow force field, and inside that force field were two animals that had to be the Yeerkbanes.

They looked like huge, long tubes covered in purple fur, scuttling around on six insect-like legs. At one end of their bodies was something I guess you have to call a tail; anyway, it was raised higher than the rest of the body, and its hairless tip waved and twitched constantly, as though it was sniffing the air. That was a little creepy, but not half as bad as what was at the other end.

Because where an ordinary animal would have had a head, these things had long, hairless, almost transparent tubes, ending in a sort of mouth big enough to swallow a human head. When they opened their mouths, which they did at least twice, you could see hundreds of tiny, slime-covered suckers, each throbbing and pulsing like they wanted to suck out your soul – which, in a sense, I guess they did.

«Now that's what _I'm_ talking about,» said Richard.

«Very impressive,» Anifal acknowledged. «They should make a highly successful battle morph.»

«That's putting it mildly,» Abby said, laughing. «I can't wait to see the look on Visser Seven's face when we come barreling into the Yeerk pool wearing those babies!»

Josh nodded. «Quite. Okay, let's see – we'll need to deactivate the force field, get inside, reactivate it to keep the rain off, demorph, acquire the vanarges, remorph, deactivate the force field again, and leave. Think we can handle that, Anifal?»

«Most probably,» said Anifal. «The force field is designed as an enclosure for sub-sentient life-forms, so it oughtn't to be very difficult to deactivate. The only possible difficulty lies…»

TTTTTSSSAAAPPP!

A nearby tuft of grass sizzled and burst into flame right in front of Anifal's longer leg. Instinctively, we all whipped our heads in the direction the shredder bolt had come from.

A small, dome-shaped shelter stood nearby the vanarges' enclosure. Just inside it, out of reach of the deadly rain, were two Andalite warriors, both holding shredders and both staring at us with cold fury.

«In that,» Anifal finished.


	11. Discrepancy

The seven of us just stood there for about three minutes, we Gedds not moving, the Andalites not firing.

«What are they waiting for?» I whispered. «I suppose they think we're Yeerks, so why don't they just shoot us and get it over with?»

«They are unsure whether we represent a threat,» Anifal replied. «There are a number of Gedd-Controllers on the Yeerk homeworld who have allied themselves with the Andalite Republic – members, for the most part, of a religious sect that believes that Yeerks and Gedds were created for each other, and that to infest other species is an abomination. The local Andalite forces do not like them, but they endure their presence.»

«And they think we're part of this crowd?» said Abby.

«They think we might be,» said Anifal. «On the other hand, we might also be apostates, seduced by the glamour of Hork-Bajir senses and wishing to rejoin the Empire – an interpretation made all the more plausible by the fact that we are currently attempting to infiltrate a mid-level-security Andalite base.»

«Terrific,» Richard muttered. «So how do we convince them that our intentions are entirely orthodox?»

«I can think of one very simple means,» said Anifal, grinning. Then he turned to the Andalites and said, in open thought-speak, «Greetings, O my brothers! May your tails never lose their cunning!»

You could tell that the Andalites weren't expecting this. All eight of their collective eyes widened, and their arms dropped slightly, as though their shredders had suddenly become a little heavier.

Anifal bowed. «I regret that I cannot greet you in my true form,» he said, «but, under the circumstances, I trust you will understand the necessity for my coyness. May I at least have the honor to know your names?»

The Andalites glanced at each other with their stalk eyes for a moment. Then the taller one stepped forward. «I am Warrior Lingfeer-Worragal-Emtash,» he said. «My companion is Warrior Orfand-Eriojim-Landiss. We are the principal overseers of Gellioss Base.»

Anifal bowed again. «An honor, indeed.»

«May we know _your_ identity?» said Lingfeer pointedly.

«I am _Aristh_ Anifal-Mekelial-Worrann,» said Anifal. «Formerly of the Dome ship _GalaxyTree_.»

«Prince Elfangor's command?»

Anifal nodded.

Lingfeer seemed impressed. «We have been awaiting news of your commander's exploits for some time,» he said. «It has been almost a year since he last communicated with the fleet. Tell me, how many Yeerks has he slain recently?»

«None recently, I am afraid,» said Anifal. «He was killed shortly after his last communication, and the _GalaxyTree_ destroyed. I am the sole survivor.»

Lingfeer and Orfand glanced at each other, and lowered their tails in the Andalite gesture of grief.

«This is sad news you bring, _A__risth_ Anifal,» said Lingfeer. «I served under Prince Elfangor before I was assigned to this post. The galaxy will not see his like again.»

Anifal inclined his head.

«And what of these others?» Lingfeer asked, gesturing to us. «Are they also Andalites?»

Anifal glanced back at Josh, who nodded slightly.

«Not precisely, Warrior Lingfeer,» said Anifal. «They are humans.»

Lingfeer and Orfand were visibly startled, and I was pretty sure I knew why. Under Andalite law, giving advanced technology to primitive species (like humans) is just about the worst crime there is. Apparently Andalites once gave space travel to the Yeerks, and they're determined not to make the same mistake twice.

«You must be mistaken, _Aristh_ Anifal,» said Lingfeer. «Humans have not yet invented morphing technology.»

«No,» Anifal agreed. «But what has not been earned can still be given.»

«And you have given this thing to the humans?» said Lingfeer, his eyes narrowing.

«Not I,» said Anifal. «I could not have done so. Only a great visionary would have dared such an act – and there was only one such Andalite aboard the _GalaxyTree_.»

Lingfeer's eyes narrowed even further at that. «You accuse Prince Elfangor of violating the law of _Seerow's Kindness_?» he demanded. «You claim that, at the moment of his death, the champion of the Andalite fleet placed our greatest weapon in the hands of humans?»

«Is it so hard to imagine?» said Anifal. He sounded genuinely puzzled.

«I do not wish to believe this, _Aristh_ Anifal,» said Lingfeer. «I do not wish to see the Hero of Kebes's name become a curse among his own people.»

«I assure you, Warrior Lingfeer, you shall not,» said Anifal. «The humans are not like the Yeerks. They are peaceable, cooperative, and capable of immense adaptation. In the few months that I have been with them, these four humans have shown themselves the equals of any Andalites I have ever known.»

«Stop it, Anifal,» said Abby. «You're embarrassing us.»

Anifal smiled. «And in any case,» he said, «surely the Andalite people would not condemn the husband of Loren Halden for showing compassion to humans.»

Lingfeer blinked. «The husband of _whom_, _Aristh_ Anifal?»

I don't think I've seen Anifal so taken aback since Josh first demorphed in front of him. Whoever this Loren person was, clearly she was common knowledge in Anifal's circle.

«You say you served under Prince Elfangor, Warrior Lingfeer?» he asked.

Lingfeer straightened his upper body proudly. «I was an officer on the Dome ship _SunTail_ for over three years,» he said.

«Then surely you must have met Loren,» said Anifal. «She was Elfangor's human wife of nearly twenty years. Their son, Tobias, served as an _aristh_ with me aboard the _GalaxyTree_.»

He laughed. «I remember: while the _GalaxyTree_ was in Z-space, on its way to Earth, Prince Elfangor gathered the crew together for a speech. When we were all assembled on the bridge, he gestured Loren and Tobias forward, and said to us, "Never forget one thing, shipmates: when you fight for Earth, you are not fighting for an abstraction. You are not fighting for 'freedom and liberty', or 'the peoples of the galaxy', or even the defeat of the Yeerks. You are fighting for five billion sentient beings like these two, and for the right of each one to live his or her life free from tyranny. That is all. Dismissed."

«At the time, none of us thought much of it,» Anifal reflected. «It was just one of those things that the Mad Genius did every so often. In retrospect, however, I suppose I should have…»

TTTTSSSAAAPPP!

Another tuft of grass in front of Anifal burst into flame – except that this time, I got the distinct impression that Lingfeer would have preferred to shoot at his head.

«_Aristh_ Anifal – if that is your true name,» he said, his thought-speak "voice" trembling with rage, «I do not know what kind of madman you are, or how you arrived on this planet. Nor do I care. Because you are a fellow Andalite, and may truly have served with Prince Elfangor, I will delay my attack for precisely one minute – but if, at then end of that minute, you and your companions are still in my line of fire, you will all die for the lie that you have spoken.»

We all stood silent for a moment, stunned.

«Warrior Lingfeer,» said Anifal, hesitantly, «I assure you…»

«You now have fifty-nine seconds,» said Lingfeer.

«Warrior Lingfeer,» said Josh, «if I may…»

«Fifty-eight seconds.»

«Warrior Lingfeer, just listen for a second!» I exploded. «We only came here because of those animals you've got under your force field. They're the natural enemies of the Yeerks, and we need to acquire them so we can defend our planet. If you'll just give us five minutes to do that, we'll get out of this base the instant we're done, and we'll never bother you or insult one of your princes again. Okay?»

«You now have forty-six seconds.»

I growled at him. (Of course, my Gedd diaphragm had been growling pretty much since I morphed, so I doubt he noticed, but it made me feel better.)

Josh sighed. «We should probably get moving,» he said privately. «I like to think I know when I'm beaten, and if we can't demorph under the force field, we'll want to have a ship over our heads within the hour.»

«Actually, within fifty-seven minutes,» Anifal said abstractedly.

«Right, and these aren't the fastest morphs in the galaxy, so the sooner we start, the better.» He threw a glance at Lingfeer. «Particularly under these circumstances.»

«You don't have to tell me twice,» said Richard. «Come on, folks, let's beat feet.»

And we turned back towards the northeast and ran as fast as our mismatched legs would carry us.


	12. Background

We walked most of the way back in silence; the sting of losing the vanarges, plus the look of bewildered betrayal on Anifal's face, did a pretty good job of keeping us from opening our mouths. After a while, though, Abby blurted the thought on all of our minds.

«So what are we going to do?» she demanded. «We're not just going to give up, are we?»

«Sure we are,» said Josh.

Abby gaped at him. «You're kidding me, right?» she said. «You, Mr. Laughs-at-Whole-Detachments-of-Hork-Bajir, are telling me that you're going to let two mule-headed guards stand between us and those furry WMDs back there?»

«Abby,» said Josh, «it's not just a question of two mule-headed guards. Once Orfand and Lingfeer get over their outrage at Anifal's blasphemy, they're going to report us to the Andalite High Command, and the Andalite High Command is going to want to know how four humans and an _aristh_ got past the tightest military blockade in Andalite history. Before long, those ships up in orbit will have their gravity sensors turned on, and then, if we try to leave this planet, every ship in that fleet will open fire on us.»

«So we shoot them fir… Oh.»

«Exactly. Chester can't fire on sentient beings, and none of the rest of us knows enough about the Ssstram ship to try and operate its weapons. So we'd be stuck on this planet, waiting for the Andalites to find us – and either they wouldn't, in which case we'd be here for the rest of our lives, or they would, in which case we'd have to try and explain ourselves to a race that considers our very existence to be the ultimate crime.» He shook his head. «No-win situation. So our best bet is to try and get off Apollo before it ever becomes an issue.»

«But we'll be back, right?» I said. «We'll come up with another plan?»

Josh turned and looked me in the eye. «We'll see, Elly,» he said. «Don't think I haven't realized what a vanarx morph would mean to you.» He sighed. «I don't know. Maybe in a few months, once the furor over us dies down… Anifal, how long would that take?»

«I do not know, Prince Josh,» said Anifal. «I am no longer sure that I know anything.»

It was hard to know what to say to that.

«It is inexplicable,» Anifal murmured. «How could he not know of Loren Halden?»

«_I_ didn't know of Loren Halden,» Richard pointed out. «Who was she, anyway?»

«Prince Elfangor's human wife.»

«Yeah, I caught that, but how… I mean, where would an Andalite prince meet a human woman?»

Anifal chuckled. «That was the question every _aristh_ asked Prince Elfangor as soon as he set hoof on board the _GalaxyTree_,» he said. «I don't know what answer he gave the others, but when I asked him, he said they met on a Skrit Na raider and ran away to Earth using a Time Matrix that they happened to find handy.»

«Not a serious answer, I take it,» Josh said.

«Hardly. I accept that the Skrit Na are the galaxy's ultimate collectors, but even they are not likely to have a mythical device conveniently lying around.» Anifal shrugged. «But however it happened, Loren and Prince Elfangor certainly met, and it seems a matter of record that, either at their meeting or shortly thereafter, something happened that caused Prince Elfangor to repudiate the Yeerk War and flee to Earth.»

«To Earth?» Richard repeated.

«Yes. Prince Elfangor lived on Earth, disguised as a human, for nearly eight of your planet's years. It was a tremendous accomplishment.»

«You ought to know,» said Abby.

Anifal's eyes narrowed. «I beg your pardon?»

«Oh, nothing.»

«So,» said Josh hastily. «Prince Elfangor lived on Earth for eight years. Then what happened?»

«Again, specifics are hard to come by,» said Anifal. «The most commonly repeated rumor stated that, after she conceived Tobias, Loren joined a _sharfeed _– or a pregnancy-support group, as you rather inelegantly call them – hosted by a newly-launched organization called the Sharing.»

«The Sharing?» said Josh. «As in…»

«Yes,» said Anifal. «It was an early form of the Yeerk host-recruitment program with which we are all familiar.»

I squirmed. I could guess where this was going.

«Loren, of course, did not know this,» said Anifal, «but her previous experience with Yeerks – whatever that may have been – led her to suspect, after a while, that something was amiss. She spoke to Prince Elfangor about it, and he began discreetly to investigate – and, of course, he eventually discovered that her suspicions were correct.

«As you can imagine, this caused him great distress. He declared to Loren that he had been a fool and a coward, that no sentient creature could rest while the Yeerks remained at large, and that there was nothing else for him to do but to return to the task he had abandoned four years ago. The following day, he planned to infiltrate a Yeerk facility of which he had learned, hijack a Yeerk starship, and rejoin the Andalite fleet – and, since he had no wish to leave Loren to raise their child alone, he asked her to come with him.»

«Whoof,» said Josh. «That's a lot to lay on a pregnant woman all of a sudden.»

«True,» said Anifal, «but Loren was not merely a pregnant woman; she was the wife of an Andalite warrior, and she acquitted herself splendidly. "Where you go," she said, "I will go; those who are your enemies shall also be mine; and when the blade of the wicked lays you low, I will take up your emblem and add to your blood my own."»

«Oh, come on,» said Richard. «No human being talks like that.»

Anifal sighed. «Perhaps those were not her exact words,» he said, «but that was her sentiment – and it was a noble sentiment, worthy of being put into noble words.»

«Uh-huh.»

«In any case,» said Anifal testily, «Prince Elfangor succeeded in capturing the Bug fighter the following day, and he and Loren left Earth. Not long after, they came across a space battle in progress, in which Prince Elfangor, since he was piloting a Yeerk ship, was able to insinuate himself into the enemy's forces and cripple them from within. This feat enabled the Andalite fleet to pull out a desperate victory, earning Prince Elfangor the admiration and gratitude of the Andalite commander, one Fadees-Tamerret-Adrai. It was on the strength of Prince Fadees's recommendation that Prince Elfangor was accepted back into the Andalite fleet, and elevated to the rank of warrior.»

«Despite having married a human woman,» said Josh.

«Exactly,» said Anifal. «Had Prince Elfangor's first reencounter with the Fleet been any less spectacular, the existence of Loren, and particularly Tobias, would have been sufficient to have him court-martialed and executed, but because he had saved so many Andalite lives – and went on to become perhaps the greatest hero of the Yeerk War – the War Council was willing to overlook his questionable personal life. Yet it never ceased to look at him askance.»

«Sort of like Ulysses S. Grant,» said Josh.

«Yes,» said Anifal reflectively. «Bad habits, but unquestioned military brilliance. Yes, General Grant is a good comparison.»

«Funny,» I said. «The way Warrior Lingfeer talked about Elfangor, he sounded more like Robert E. Lee.»

Anifal spread his hands. «As I said, it is inexplicable,» he said.

«The part I don't get is this Tobias thing,» said Abby. «How could an Andalite have a child by a human woman?»

Anifal frowned. «Well, he had a human morph, of course…»

«Yeah, obviously,» said Abby, «but I didn't think you could have a baby in morph. I mean, when you eat in morph, you don't put on weight…»

«That is because the food you eat in morph remains in your morph's stomach,» said Anifal, «and consequently can have no effect on your natural form. On the other hand, when we fight the Yeerks, the blood we spill remains on the Yeerk-pool floor even after we demorph. You see the difference?»

Abby hesitated. «I think so,» she said. «You're saying that a man can father a child while he's in morph, because the stuff he contributes is no longer part of him after he's contributed it.»

«Exactly.»

A wide smile slowly spread over Abby's face. «Well, that opens up some interesting future possibilities,» she said. «Doesn't it, Josh?»

Josh suddenly became very interested in the surrounding landscape.

«Say, this is where we landed,» he said suddenly. «Does anyone remember where we left the ship?»

«Well,» said Richard, «at a guess, I would say right over there.»

We all turned in the direction he was pointing. Sure enough, about twenty yards away from us, where only two seconds before there had been nothing but red dirt and green sky, there now stood a blue, leafless tree the size of a house, in front of which stood a gleaming steel-and-ivory android.

"So," called Chester cheerfully. "How'd it go?"

The five of us looked at each other.

«I think I'll let you tell him, Anifal,» said Josh.


	13. Logic

Never expect sympathy from an android. After we had left the planet and gotten safely into Z-space (and Richard had darted into the Ssstram ship's bathroom to regurgitate the effects of Chester's flying), I gave Chester the bare-bones account of our mission – that we had failed to acquire the vanarges, that we had nearly been killed by someone who was theoretically our ally, and that, if he hadn't gotten us off of Apollo so quickly, we might very well have been stranded there for the rest of our lives – and his sole comment was, "Well, they say these things are sent to try us."

I suppose he noticed that that didn't exactly console me, because he quickly added, "But I suppose you're not in the mood for philosophy."

"No," I said.

"No, indeed," said Abby. "When you're feeling bewildered, you don't want other people to smirk like they know everything and tell you how good the experience is for your soul. You want them either to give you an explanation or be decently bewildered with you."

"Is that so?" said Chester.

"Yes, it is," said Abby. "So tell us, O Great One: How could Warrior Lingfeer not have heard of Loren Halden?"

Chester leaned back on the balls of his feet and folded his hands. "Well, let's think about that," he said. "The first thing to realize is that it's not just an issue of Lingfeer. It's also an issue of the other warrior, what was his name…"

"Orfand," said Josh.

"Right. Remember, Orfand didn't stop Lingfeer from trying to shoot you, so whatever the explanation is, it has to apply to both of them. If Lingfeer was lying, Orfand was in on it; if Lingfeer was crazy, Orfand had the same psychosis; and if Lingfeer genuinely believed that Elfangor never married a human woman, Orfand must have believed it, too."

"Okay…" I said.

"Okay, so let's take each possibility in turn," said Chester. "If they were lying, that means they had an ulterior motive for denying Loren's existence. Now what motive would two Andalite warriors stationed out in the middle of nowhere have for pretending to believe that a woman who is known by the entire Andalite people to have existed did not exist?"

The five of us stood there for a moment, staring at each other.

"Okay, then," said Chester finally. "Forget that one. Option two: Lingfeer and Orfand were insane. Having seen the planet they were stationed on up close, I would call that entirely plausible…"

Anifal shifted. «With respect, Chester,» he said, «I must contradict you on that point.»

Chester frowned. "You don't think Apollo is a good place to go mad?"

«Of course it is,» said Anifal, «and the Andalite homeworld knows this. That is why all Andalite officers stationed on the Yeerk homeworld are subjected regularly to intense psychological scrutiny, and withdrawn from their posts if they exhibit the slightest sign of mental irregularity. It is flatly impossible that even one such officer, let alone two, should have been allowed to fall so deeply into madness as to have convinced themselves of the non-occurrence of one of Andalite history's most sensational episodes.»

What he said made sense, but I think we were all a little surprised by his tone. Anifal's generally one of the calmer Morph Forcers, but right then he seemed weirdly tense, like he wanted the subject changed immediately. He got like that every so often, and I wasn't quite sure why.

"Well, then," said Chester after a moment, "the only option left is that Lingfeer was telling the truth, and neither he nor Orfand had ever heard of Loren or Tobias."

"Which seems to entail never having heard of Prince Elfangor," said Josh. "If Anifal's telling the truth, Elfangor's story was pretty much inextricable from Loren's."

"'If Anifal's telling the truth,'" Chester repeated thoughtfully. "Suppose he isn't?"

"What?" said the four of us, pretty much simultaneously.

"Think about it," said Chester. "If Anifal's telling the truth, Lingfeer and Orfand must have been either lying or mad. We've established that they were neither, so the logical conclusion is that he isn't."

I stared at him, wide-eyed. "But… but what motive would Anifal have to lie?"

"Well, what did he accomplish by it?" said Chester.

"Nothing!" I said. "We didn't even get to acquire the…"

"The vanarges. Exactly. And suppose that Anifal never wanted you to acquire the vanarges in the first place?"

"Huh?"

"Suppose," Chester repeated, "that Anifal never wanted you to acquire the vanarges in the first place."

I frowned. "Then why didn't he say something before we left Earth?"

"Probably because he knew he couldn't talk you out of it," said Chester. "Maybe there was a specific host he didn't want freed, and he knew that you would free it if you acquired a vanarx morph. He couldn't very well say that to you, so his only option would be to pretend to go along and then sabotage the mission from within. And you have to admit that, if that was his plan, he succeeded brilliantly."

Dumbstruck, I turned to look at Anifal, half expecting him to morph to _sharbat _and tear out Chester's mainframe for having revealed his secret. To my surprise, he was actually smiling – well, not smiling, but that thing Andalites do with their eyes that's like smiling.

«So then, Chester,» he said, «your theory is that I was betraying the Morph Force for my own advantage – and, presumably, that I was eager not to have Prince Josh learn this.»

"Basically," said Chester.

«In that case,» said Anifal, «why did I not let you believe that Lingfeer and Orfand were mad? Surely, if I had not spoken, you would have come to that conclusion.»

Chester arched a holographic eyebrow.

"Thank you, Anifal," he said. "It's nice to know that I don't have to do all the reasoning around here."

Josh frowned, but said nothing.

"So then," said Chester, "to sum up, Lingfeer and Orfand could not have been lying, they could not have been insane, and they could not have been telling the truth." He sighed. "Obviously, then, we're missing something. The question is, what?"

Then, for no apparent reason, he suddenly turned and darted toward the instrument panel, stared frantically at it for a few moments, and said what I later learned was a very bad word in Akkadian.

"What's the matter?" said Richard as he came out of the bathroom (still a little unsteady, but better than he had gone in).

Chester let out a low moan. "Richard," he said, "tell me you didn't eject a waste capsule a few moments ago."

"Oh, no," said Josh wearily. "Not this routine again."

"Batten down the hatches!" Abby shouted. "Arm the shredder cannons! Get out the holy water! Grabbadil's back, and she's _angry_!"

Well, after that, I suppose it wasn't surprising that we never got back to the Lingfeer-Loren discussion. That night, though, as I curled up in my force-field bedroll on the floor of the bridge, I couldn't help thinking about the last thing Chester had said.

_Obviously, we're missing something. The question is… what?_


	14. Crisis Point

"And here we are," said Chester, deactivating the Ssstram ship's last few Z-space stabilizers. "Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill."

"More like home _to_ the sea," said Abby, staring lovingly out the main viewscreen at the Earth in front of us. "It's amazing what a relief it is to see oceans made of water again."

Chester smiled, and then blinked. "Hmm, that's odd," he said.

"What?" said Josh.

"I can't make contact with the Chee-net," said Chester. "It must be down for repairs."

"Down for repairs?" I repeated, starting to panic. "Someone broke the Chee-net?"

Chester laughed. "Calm down, Elly," he said. "It's not a big deal. Every so often, two of the Chee will try to send messages along the same pathway, and the strain on that pathway will cause an energy drain elsewhere in the Net. After that happens enough times, some minor part of the system will fail completely, which causes an error message to be sent to three specific Chee who serve as sort of our command modules. They take the Chee-net offline, switch it over to analysis mode, spend about an hour locating and fixing the problem, and then put it back up again, right as rain."

"Oh."

Josh laughed. "So the Chee have problems with their Internet connections, too," he said. "Well, that's good to know."

«Does this happen often?» Anifal wanted to know. He seemed a little nervous; probably he was remembering the time a Chee-net message had kept him from being permanently trapped in stinkbug morph.

Chester shook his head. "Not what you'd call often, no," he said. "About once a century, usually."

«Ah.» Anifal nodded. «I believe we can accept that level of uncertainty.»

And on that nonchalant note, we dropped the subject.

Looking back, I'm amazed that our Morph-Force paranoia didn't pick up on this; I mean, an event that only occurs once every hundred years, and it just happens to be waiting for us at the end of a trip full of crazy Andalite warriors and disappearing waste capsules? Surely one of us ought to have smelled a rat.

But no. I guess we all wanted to believe that our ride in the Twilight Zone was over now that Earth was in view, and so we blocked the thought out of our minds – which was too bad, because it might have prepared us for what came next.

* * *

First, there was the brush in the clearing. The Ssstram ship wasn't especially noticeable, as starships go (if it had been, we couldn't very well have kept it hidden for three months) but even so, it had left its mark on the clearing where we had left it – landing-pad indentations, burned vegetation, that kind of thing. When we landed, though, there was none of that; the clearing looked absolutely untouched, as if no one had even walked through there for the last three years, let alone tried to hide a starship there. 

Then, while Josh and I were flying back home in chickadee morph, there was a moment when I thought I saw the silhouette of the old logging mill through the trees – which was impossible, of course, since the logging mill had been completely destroyed during our first battle with Sub-Visser Twenty. It was just for a second, and I don't think Josh even noticed, but it freaked me out a little.

But the clincher came when we got back to the house. We made a quick circuit around to the garage, and established that the minivan wasn't in the driveway. That wasn't surprising: it was Friday, and Friday evening is when Mom typically drags Daddy and us to see a play, as a sort of gesture of solidarity with her sister, who runs the local opera house. (Mom herself is a small-claims judge, and one of her brothers is on the city council. Our maternal family is very well-connected.) On the other hand, the light in my bedroom window was on, which meant that Katy, the Chee who was playing me, must have managed to talk Mom into letting her stay home. I was faintly jealous; in eleven years, I'd never managed to win an argument with Mom. (Of course, Katy did have a few thousand years more experience in negotiating than I did.)

«Okay, let's see what we're working with here,» said Josh. «As far as the neighbors know, you're still home, but I've gone to go see _The Glass Streetcar_ or whatever Aunt Carrie's putting on this week. That means that I'll have to go in in bug morph, since we don't want Mrs. Clary looking out her front window and seeing me home before I get home. You, on the other hand, could just go in the front door…»

«In my morphing outfit?» I said.

«Why not?» said Josh. «It's a warm summer night; you could easily have gone out to wander around the yard barefoot in a leotard. It's a leotard that you hate, yes, but Mrs. Clary doesn't know that…»

«Josh,» I interrupted, «I know what you're trying to do, but if you don't mind going in in morph, do you seriously think I do?»

As nearly as a chickadee can smile, Josh did. «Well, maybe not,» he said. «I just thought you should have the option.»

«And I thank you for that,» I said. «You are a prince among brothers. Now, can we get this over with?»

«Sure.»

We flew into the garage, demorphed in the little nook where Mom keeps preserves in the fall, and then remorphed into our standard insect morphs: wasp for Josh, ladybug for me. Then we buzzed over to the house and slipped through a small crack in the basement wall.

It's amazing how being a Morph Forcer changes your perspective on things. When I was ten, part of the reason I wanted to be a nun was so I could live in a big, three-hundred-year-old abbey with moss and ivy growing over the walls. Now I think that, if I survive the war, I'm going to look for the most modern abbey I can find where the nuns still wear habits. Crumbling stonework loses some of its romance when you know exactly how many ways there are for bugs to get into it.

Anyway, Josh demorphed again once we got into the house, but I decided to stay in ladybug morph until I got upstairs. The reason I gave Josh was that I wanted to startle Katy, just to get revenge for all the times I'd turned around and seen one of the Chee standing two feet from my nose, but I'm pretty sure he saw through that. The truth was, I just wanted to stay in morph a little longer.

It sounds weird, but I think the ladybug may be my favorite of all my morphs. For one thing, there's the bizarre sensation of having six legs; I don't think I can really explain it to anyone who hasn't felt it, but trust me, it's cool. Then there's the antennae thing: can you imagine experiencing sound, smell, and touch, all through the same body part? And above all, there's the way ladybugs fly.

If you've ever been outside in summer and don't live in Alaska, you know what I'm talking about. None of this wimpy jump-off-a-branch-flap-your-wings-and-attain-a-reasonable-rate-of-speed stuff that chickadees do. No, when you're a ladybug, you just open your shell, turn on your little internal motor, and – VRRROOOOOMMMMM!

And that was what I did now: VRRROOOOOMMMMM up the stairs, and VRRROOOOOMMMMM through the loft, and VRRROOOOOMMMMM through the crack beneath my door, and VRRROOOOOMMMMM into my bedroom, and VRRROOOOOMMMMM-_plop_ onto the window just above my bed.

I sighed and glanced around. That's the other thing about ladybugs: you wouldn't think it to look at them, but they actually have really good eyesight. My room looked pretty much the way I'd left it, except maybe a little cleaner – and that's not exactly surprising when you leave it in the hands of an extremely systematic android for a week.

The android herself was sitting on my bed, reading what looked like my copy of _Now We Are Six_. I was startled yet again by just how skillful the Chee's mimicry was; Katy had reproduced everything about me, from the way I clung to one of my pigtails when I lay down to the little mole just above my left eyebrow.

I took a deep breath. «Hey, Katy,» I whispered. «It's me.»

In one sense, I got the reaction I had been hoping for: Katy's head jerked up, and she looked wildly around the room. The look on her face, though, wasn't the simple expression of surprise I had been expecting; I wasn't sure what exactly it was, but it seemed to be part shock, part terror, and (just maybe) part wild, insane hope.

«Katy?» I said uncertainly.

And then the figure on the bed said, or rather hissed, a single word – the absolute last word I had expected to hear.

"_Andalite!_"


	15. Doppelgänger

My first thought was that Katy had malfunctioned somehow. I knew she was one of the Chee who had accepted Yeerks in their heads so they could infiltrate the Sharing; maybe some toggle bolt had gone wrong in her head and now her Yeerk was actually controlling her.

My second thought was that that was ridiculous. Any Yeerk who had access to Chee memories would have known that I wasn't an Andalite. Besides, the Chee had survived for four thousand years on Earth, and who knew how many on the Pemalite homeworld before that, and you don't survive that long by being prone to glitches.

My third thought was that I didn't have time for luxuries like thinking, because Katy, or whoever it was that was in my room and looked exactly me, was clearly taking an inventory of all the insects in the room, and I didn't think she was planning on starting an ant farm.

As if to confirm my suspicions, she reached up to the top of the bedroom wall and squished an innocent spider. And that was the first thing she did that wasn't an exact duplicate of me, because when I squish a spider, I generally whisper an apology to it first and then get the thing over with as quickly as possible. She, on the other hand, gently pressed down on the spider, watched its guts squirt out of its abdomen with a quiet smile, and then leisurely smeared it across the wallpaper. It looked like she was marking the wall: ON JULY 22, 2006, AN ANDALITE WARRIOR MET A GRUESOME FATE ON THIS SPOT.

Then she repeated the process with a nearby stinkbug.

Now, maybe I'm not the most natural warrior in the world, but I can tell a crunch situation when I see one, and I instantly started running through all my options. I couldn't fly away, because that would just draw the pseudo-Katy's attention to me. I couldn't demorph, for the same reason. I could maybe crawl out of the room, but the door was a long way away, and I didn't want to stake my life on my ability to crawl that much faster than my double could swat.

In other words, I was up a crick. There was no way I could get myself out of this situation alive; I needed help, and I needed it fast.

I don't think I've ever been so grateful not to be an only child.

«Josh!» I thought-spoke urgently, hoping he could still hear me. «Something's gone wrong; Katy's either flipped out or been replaced by a Controller, and she's methodically squashing every bug in my room. We need backup up here _now_!»

Josh didn't answer. I didn't expect him to; we can't use thought-speak when we're in our human forms, and shouting "Roger!" up the stairs would have been a really stupid thing to do. All the same, it's not exactly comfortable to be alone in a room with a murderous version of yourself and not to know whether anybody's heard you yell for help.

It was pretty clear by this point that the fake me was going around my room, killing anything that might conceivably have been a morph. Fortunately, it was summer, which meant my room was pretty much swarming with bugs, and she was still a fairish distance from where I was – but, somehow, that wasn't extraordinarily comforting.

There was nothing I could do. It was all in God's hands – and Josh's. I kept telling myself that, and trying frantically to think of something else so I could keep reasonably calm, but for some reason my brain refused to cooperate. One way or another, all my thoughts led back to the figure in front of me.

There was no way she could be a Chee, was there? Chee didn't kill. Chee _couldn't_ kill, and they certainly couldn't have as much fun killing as this person was. She had to be a real Controller somehow.

Unless Chester had been hiding something from us all this time. By now, I was getting ready to believe anything.

_Squish._ Down went another spider.

_Squish._ A fellow ladybug.

_Squish._ A mosquito.

«Josh…» I pleaded. «Hurry…»

«Relax, little sister,» said a thrice-blessed voice in my head. «Aslan's got the situation under control.»

«Josh?» I perked up. «Where are you?»

«Right where you want me to be, I suspect,» said Josh.

And the door to my bedroom burst open, and a full-grown African lion leaped across the bed and pinned my would-be assassin to the ground.

My last remaining doubts about my double's being a Chee were dispelled as I watched her try to struggle against Josh's battle morph. You'd never know it to look at them, but the Chee are actually fantastically strong; I once saw Chester pick up a Hork-Bajir-Controller and toss him into a tree. This person, on the other hand, though she was clearly trying desperately to get out from under my brother, never managed to do much more than flail her head around a few times. Whatever she was, she definitely wasn't Katy.

Finally, she sighed, stopped squirming, and stared up at Josh thoughtfully. "So it was you," she said.

I guessed that she thought that Josh was the one who had thought-spoken to her earlier. Whether Josh guessed the same thing, I don't know, but he played along in any case.

«Yes,» he said, in the fake Andalite accent we use to talk to Yeerks. «It was me.»

"A lion," the pseudo-me mused. "Strange."

Josh cocked his head. «And what is so strange about a lion, Yeerk?» he said.

"Well, it's not one of your usual choices, is it?" said my double. "Tigers, yes – there always seems to be a tiger involved when you people make your attacks – but I don't remember ever seeing a lion before, unless you count that one time at the Big Six Conference."

Josh blinked, and if I had had eyelids, I would have done the same. I recognized the Big Six reference – that had been one of the bigger fiascoes among our recent missions – but what was this bit about tigers? None of us had ever morphed a tiger.

"You're not the lion at the Big Six Conference, are you?" said my double. "I hope not. He was a bit of a wimp, by all accounts; I'd hate to think I got captured by him."

The comment seemed to snap Josh back to reality. «You may judge for yourself, Yeerk,» he said. «Would this "wimp", as you call him, be likely to do this?»

He grabbed my double's head in his paws and whacked it against my dresser. It wasn't a particularly elegant maneuver – Anifal, with his tail blade, is generally better at that sort of thing – but it did the trick. My double went out like a light.

«Thanks, Josh,» I said.

«Don't mention it,» said Josh, without turning to look at me (not that he necessarily knew where I was, of course). Then he plopped down on his haunches, and sighed.

«Well, this tears it,» he said. «Disappearing waste capsules: okay. Andalites that don't know their own history: fine. A burned-away section of brush that magically regrows itself completely in a little less than a week: perfectly in order. But _this_ is completely unacceptable.»

«Agreed,» I said. «So what are we going to do?»

«Well, our first priority, obviously, is to find out what's going on here,» said Josh. «And since only one person we've met so far seems to have information that might help us do that –» Here he turned and stared significantly at my unconscious double. «– I'd say she's got some explaining to do.»

I hesitated. «You're not going to… you know…»

«Torture her?» said Josh coolly. «Certainly not. Unlike my erstwhile opponent, Zennin Two-One-Five, I fully believe in the Geneva Convention. No, this is just going to be a nice, friendly conversation between two people, one of whom is being held captive by powerful warriors who clearly don't like her much. Like what Agent Gibbs does on that TV show Mom won't let you watch.»

«Which one?»

«The one with four initials for a name instead of three.»

And with that, he stepped back, away from my double, and, for no reason that I could see, started to demorph.

«Hang on,» I said. «What are you doing?»

«Slipping into something more innocuous,» said Josh. «If someone in the woods came across an African lion carrying an unconscious girl by the neck, he'd have the law down on me in no time flat. Whereas, if –» Here his head became too human for him to use thought-speak, so he had to wait until his mouth and throat reshaped themselves before he continued. "If the same person met two humans walking through the woods together, he wouldn't think anything was wrong."

«So you're going to try and convince her that your natural form is a morph?» I said. «Do you think that's going to work?»

"Not in the least," said Josh, as the last remnants of lion were sucked back into his body. "She'd recognize my natural form, and she knows that her brother's never talked about being approached by a blue centaur from outer space. No, I had something a bit more subtle in mind."

And, as I watched, he started to morph again, although not very radically. He shrank about a foot in height; his arms and legs became shorter and thinner; his hair shot out to twice its normal length, and changed from sandy brown to a sort of dish-water blonde…

«What are you…»

Josh turned a freckled, snub-nosed face toward me, and said in a very familiar voice, "Oh, come on, Elly. If you don't recognize this morph, you need some serious psychological help."

I stared at him. I knew that Josh had a morph of me, of course – that was kind of a hard incident to forget – but it hadn't occurred to me that he might want to use it now. Once I thought about it, though, it made sense: if Josh really was a stranded Andalite, the way he was pretending to be, he certainly wouldn't show his usual human morph to a known enemy. Instead, he'd acquire the enemy herself and use that: the one morph that couldn't possibly tell her anything she didn't know.

But geez-o-pete, it was freaky. I mean, here I was, sitting on my own windowpane, looking at not one, but two carbon copies of myself, one of which I knew was really my brother. That's the sort of thing that can permanently traumatize a person.

Josh, however, didn't seem a bit concerned for my emotional well-being. As soon as he was finished morphing, he went over to my dresser and pulled out the sweater I had gotten from Grandmother last Christmas and a ladybug-patterned jumper, which he then proceeded to put on. (Nice touch, that: it was exactly the kind of mismatched fashion choice that an Andalite would have made under the same circumstances.) Then he reached into my top drawer and pulled out a jewelry box with a picture of Cinderella on the lid.

«I hope you're not planning on looking in there,» I said.

"Just for a second," said Josh. "I suspect it contains something I'm going to need."

He undid the latch, opened the lid, closed his eyes, and reached inside. He groped around for a second or two, then pulled out a big, black object that looked eerily like the phasers on _Star Trek: The Next Generation_.

"I thought so," he said with a grin. "A Yeerk in your head, looking for a place to hide her Dracon beam. Naturally, she puts it in your secret treasure chest. It's the one place no one who knows you would dare to look."

«Except you, apparently,» I said.

"Desperate situations require desperate measures, Elly," said Josh. Then he walked over to the place where my double was sitting, gave her a little kick in the ribs, and said, in thought-speak, «Get up, Yeerk. The two of us need to take a little walk.»

My double stirred, moaned softly, and opened her eyes a crack. Then she caught sight of Josh, and opened her eyes much more widely indeed.

Josh grinned. «My thanks, Yeerk,» he said. «You have provided me with a very useful morph – although the eyesight could stand to be improved a trifle. Now, on your feet and let us go. Any attempt to slow down, contact another Controller, or otherwise hinder our progress, and you will feel the taste of this poorly made but nonetheless effective weapon.»

My double didn't need to be told twice. She clambered to her feet, a little wobbly but basically steady, and hurried out the door of my room. Josh stashed the Dracon beam in the pocket of my jumper and followed her.

The last thing I heard from him was a thought-speak directive: «Demorph as soon as we're out of sight, Elly. We want Mom and Dad to find at least one version of you at home when they get back.»

The last thing I saw of him was his retreating silhouette on the road. He and my double were walking up Wills Lane, looking just like any other pair of twelve-year-old identical twins. Then the road dipped down behind a hill, and the two of them were lost to sight.

I prayed to God and all the saints that he knew what he was doing.


	16. Memories

I flew down to the floor and demorphed, then went over to my dresser and pulled on a purple floral-print blouse and matching skirt. Then I flopped down on my bed and pulled my Cinderella box toward me.

I had expected its contents to be radically changed, like everything else seemed to be lately. Instead, it was almost exactly the way I remembered it; the only difference was that all of the more recent stuff was gone, as though the Yeerk me hadn't bothered to put anything in it during the last six months.

All the older stuff, though, was there: the tattered blue-jay feather that I had had since I was four, the yellow stone from the lake that looked like a golden egg when you dipped it in water, the Petoskey stone that Daddy had bought for me during a book tour in Michigan, the pinecone named Malinalda that I had decided was sacred the instant I found it, and all the other odd trinkets that I had fallen in irrational and unswervable love with in the past twelve years.

I reached in at random and pulled out a dirty Bicentennial quarter. That was one of the more recent additions to the collection: I had found it when I was running down the roadside to call Josh to dinner, the night that we had met Elfangor and had become the Morph Force.

I still remembered the incident in detail: I had been running down the dirt road near the house, panting heavily (distance running has never been my strength, mostly because I have very short legs), when I saw a glint of silver out of the corner of my eye. I looked down and saw a quarter, half-buried in the dirt, but with enough of it exposed to tell that it had a man with a drum engraved on it, instead of the usual eagle or profile of George Washington. At first I thought it was another one of those state quarters that I hadn't seen yet, but then I picked it up and realized that it didn't have a state's name on it – and anyway, it was too old to be a state quarter; the date on the heads side said 1976.

I stuffed it into my skirt pocket, intending to ask Daddy about it when I got back to the house – but then, of course, the four of us ran into a dying alien warrior and gained the power to turn into animals, and so it kind of slipped my mind. It wasn't until the next Wednesday, when I was emptying the pockets of my clothes so I could put them in the laundry, that I rediscovered the quarter and showed it to Daddy. He said it was a special kind of quarter that had been minted in celebration of America's Bicentennial, adding, with the exaggeratedly uninterested tone he gets when he's trying to discourage my packrat tendencies, that he had probably seen millions of them back when he was in high school, and that they weren't anything to get excited about.

Well, maybe not from his perspective, but my feeling is that, if you discover a special coin on the evening that you first encounter aliens, you don't just give it away to the next checkout clerk you're trying to buy a soda from. So I plunked it into the Cinderella box with all my other little treasures.

It occurred to me, looking at it now, what a weird omen it was, if you believed in that sort of thing. On the one hand, I had found it tails up, which was supposed to be bad luck – but on the other hand, the kind of tails it had made it about fifty times rarer than a regular quarter, which could only mean that finding it was good luck. It was as though it couldn't make up its mind what kind of luck it wanted to be – which was pretty much how I felt about being a Morph Forcer.

With a sigh, I placed the quarter down on top of the jewelry box and spun it on its side. It did better than most of the quarters I spin: it whirled around the center of the lid for about eight seconds before finally clattering to rest heads up.

George Washington's face stared up at me, and for some reason my thoughts drifted to Josh. It suddenly occurred to me what a crazy thing he was doing; did he really think that anyone who met two carbon copies of me wasn't going to think something was up? People knew our family in this town – we had all been photographed in the paper when Mom was elected judge – and they knew that I wasn't identical twins. And even if they didn't recognize me, they'd still try to start a conversation, and what was Josh going to do then? If he acted too much like a human, my duplicate would know he wasn't an Andalite, but if he acted the way a real Andalite (like Anifal, for instance) would act, the person he was talking to would think he was nuts. Either way, something would go wrong.

_Of course, to hear you tell it, Eldora, _I thought to myself, _something will go wrong no matter what happens._ Which was true, of course, and was the reason I wasn't the leader of the Morph Force. Instilling confidence in people isn't something I'm good at.

I took a deep breath and told myself to focus. Whether Josh succeeded or failed out there was up to him, not me; I could worry myself into a coma, and it wouldn't help him one bit. I just had to relax; there was nothing I could do about it.

Well, actually, there was one thing – and as soon as I realized it, I rolled off my bed, grabbed Malinalda, and started praying like a crazy person. I started by addressing God directly, and I kept that up for about three minutes, but there are only so many different ways you can say _Lord, please keep my brother safe_, and when I ran out of those I didn't feel like I was done yet, so I just started asking intercession from every saint I could think of, starting with the Virgin Mary and working my way down.

I don't know how long I kept that up, but I had just gotten to St. Marcel of Paris (he's the one you invoke against vampires, and no, I'm not going to tell you where I learned that) when I got a feeling like a restraining hand on my mind. _That's enough, Elly,_ it seemed to say. _You've done all you need to do in that department. Now it's time to start attending to your other jobs._

It was good advice. If nothing else, I needed to figure out what I was going to do when Mom and Dad got home: should I act like me, on the theory that that's what a Yeerk who was Controlling me would do, or should I try to act like a Yeerk acting like me? (Whatever that meant.) Clearly, this was going to take some serious thought, and I was just getting ready to start giving it some when I happened to open my eyes and catch sight of a plastic Scooter doll poking its head out of my treasure chest.

I had gotten it as a present from Josh on my ninth birthday. It was a bad joke on his part; I had been begging for a scooter since Andrea had gotten one for her own birthday three months earlier, and Josh, who had been a big _Muppet Show_ fan at the time, decided that, if I wanted a scooter, then he would find me a Scooter. It had cost him a quarter at the local Salvation Army, and I had been so tickled by the idea that I had put it in my Cinderella box that evening.

I'm not sure what exactly it was, but seeing that little orange Muppet head poking out of the jewelry box, goggling at me in that oblivious way that only plastic figurines can, just jabbed at some sensitive spot in my heart, and I buried my face in my comforter and started crying my eyes out. I cried because I wasn't nine years old anymore, I cried because life was so much more complicated than _The Muppet Show_, I cried because Yeerks didn't get birthday presents, and I cried because the universe needed someone to cry for it, but most of all I cried for Josh. Josh, who used to made bad jokes about scooters and now made weary jokes about Visser Seven's appetite for subordinates; who had once missed three days of school to look after me when I had the flu, and now had to risk my life about once a week; who was doing so much more than any of us had ever wanted him to do, and as a result couldn't do the things I had always counted on him to do. Josh, Josh…

I cried till my bed looked like I had relapsed from toilet training, and I might have cried longer if I hadn't heard a sound of squeaking hinges as the door of my room swung open.

"Elly?" came a familiar voice.

I blinked, swallowed two or three times, and looked up toward my door. My glasses were streaky with tears, but there was still no mistaking the tall, sandy-haired figure standing uncertainly in my doorway.

"Josh?" I whispered.

"Something wrong, Elly?" he said, and the way he said it was so much like the way he would have said it on my ninth birthday that, before I knew quite what I was doing, I had leapt to my feet, raced over to him, wrapped my arms around his chest, and started crying all over again into his sweater.

"I didn't think you'd miss me this badly," said Josh with a nervous laugh.

"No," I said in between sobs, "I didn't, either."


	17. Siesta

Richard thinks I ought to have realized it sooner. "You'd already seen a you that wasn't you," he said when he heard the story. "Obviously, sooner or later, you could expect to run into a Josh that wasn't Josh. I mean, even I can see that one coming."

Well, whoop-dee-doo for him. Maybe if I spent my life doing shot-by-shot analyses of _The Wrath of Khan_, I'd start to anticipate these things too. As it was, however, the first hint I got that something was haywire only came after I had finished pouring the aqueous 75% of my body onto Josh's chest, peeled myself off him, took a deep breath, and said, with as steady a voice as I could manage, "So, how did it go?"

Josh rolled his eyes and sighed. "Let me give you a piece of advice that might save your sanity someday, Elly," he said. "Anytime it looks like someone might invite you to a three-hour marathon of one-act absurdist plays, make sure you have a dental appointment scheduled for that day."

I blinked. I was grateful for the advice, of course, but it didn't seem to have much to do with questioning Yeerks.

"Huh?" I said.

"I mean, I don't know what the deal is with this intellectual-drama kick Aunt Carrie's been on lately," said Josh. "What was wrong with musicals, farces, and the occasional soppy-love-story-slash-murder-mystery? Why, all of a sudden, do we need to spend hours on end probing the tormented souls of Norwegian housewives, or watching idiot Angels of Death taking old ladies out of sandboxes?"

"Oh," I said slowly, starting to realize what was going on. "You mean… you mean that you went to the play with Mom and Dad this evening?"

Josh gave me a weird look. "Of course I went to the play with them," he said. "I can't figure out how you managed to get out of going to the play with them, unless you managed to convince Mom that you had another Sharing project that absolutely had to be finished by Monday."

I shrugged and smiled weakly. "What can I say?" I managed. "Dr. Daught's the president of our local chapter, not me."

Josh shook his head. "There's an obsessive streak to this co-ed Girl Scouts of yours that I'm not sure I like, Ells," he said. "It's like they expect you to give them every waking moment of your life, not just the few hours a week that a normal organization would be satisfied with."

I didn't say anything to that. In the first place, he was right: every waking moment was exactly what the Sharing (or, rather, the alien empire behind the Sharing) expected from its members. In the second place, I was too busy trying to process the new data that he had provided to form anything like a coherent sentence.

Okay, when Josh had left this room, he had been in morph as me (which meant he would be wearing just his morphing outfit when he changed back), and he had been escorting a Yeerk version of me somewhere so he could question her about all the weird stuff that was going on. Now, he was standing in my doorway wearing a sweater, tie, and slacks, he was claiming to have spent the evening at the theater with Mom and Dad, and he thought I was a member of the Sharing. So what was that supposed to mean? Did Josh have a twin, too – one who was expecting to meet the Yeerk me, and instead had gotten the real me? And if so, what was I supposed to do now?

I had no idea how to answer any of those questions. Fortunately, Josh (or this Josh, or whoever he was) chose this moment to ask me an easier one. "Have you had dinner yet?" he asked.

"Um… no," I said.

Josh grinned. "I didn't think so," he said. "I told Mom when we left that it was pointless to remind you: that you could be sitting directly downwind from Maxim's, with all the aromas of the world's greatest cuisine blowing right through your window, and you'd still forget about dinner until someone called you. Well, do you want me to make you some macaroni or something?"

There was something about his smile, and about the way he asked – nonchalant, affectionate, eager to please – that made me feel sure, somehow, that this wasn't Anifal's prince I was talking to. There was a softness about this Josh that I hadn't seen in my brother in a long time – in fact, not since that evening a year ago when Elfangor had given us the morphing power.

"Um… yeah," I said, feeling a smile slowly creep across my face. "Yeah, that'd be great."

* * *

My brother is a wonderful person in many ways, but he's really not much of a cook. The macaroni and cheese he made for me had way more cheese in it than I wanted, and half of the noodles were still distinctly chewy – so I don't think it was just my notorious un-pickiness about food that made it one of the best meals I'd ever had.

It was weird. Here I was, a member of Earth's sole line of defense against the Yeerk invasion, pretending to be a Yeerk myself to three people who looked exactly like my family, except that I knew one of them wasn't my brother and, since the other two seemed to know all about my recent Sharing activities, they might not have been my parents, either. You'd think I'd have been as tense as a guitar string.

But I wasn't, and I'm still not sure why. Maybe it was because, even though I was keeping two different secrets at once, I didn't really feel the need to conceal anything. I knew I wasn't a Controller, and nobody expected me to be a Morph Forcer, so I was free to just be Elly and not worry about anything else. When Mom teased me about needing to eat more lest I blow away on the next wind, I could just smile and say that I didn't think we needed to worry about hurricanes much around here; when Josh and Daddy got into an argument about whether Eugène Ionesco was a great literary genius or someone who just put random words together and hoped people would think he was being profound, I could laugh at Daddy's quotations from _Rhinoceros_ without Josh giving me a knowing wink; and when I yawned and decided to go to bed early, and Mom got up from the pile of legal briefs she was studying to come and kiss me goodnight, I could get all teary-eyed at the touch of her lips on my forehead without a nasty little voice in my mind reminding me that this was exactly the sort of thing a Controller would do. It was a nice feeling.

It didn't last, of course; these things never do. No sooner had I changed into my nightgown, said my prayers, and tucked myself into bed than I heard a tapping sound on my window – and when I raised my head to look at it, there was a Mexican free-tailed bat hanging from the edge of the roof, staring at me in a significant manner.

"Josh?" I said with a little sigh.

«No, it's Abby,» said the bat. «Get yourself morphed. Meeting in the clearing in fifteen minutes.»


	18. Illumination

«I've got to hand it to you, Elly,» said Abby, as the two of us flew through the darkened forest.

«Why?» I said.

«The way you handled it when you ran into the Yeerk you,» said Abby. «Josh told us all about it. I've got to say, if my twin had turned out to be a Controller, I wouldn't have stayed nearly as cool as you did.»

I blinked. «Wait a minute – you mean… you mean you had a double, too?»

«Oh, yeah,» said Abby. «The poor kid, she's probably scarred for life by now. Bad enough to hear voices, but when the voices start insisting that they're you and you're an android, that's got to be the ultimate in incipient paranoia. She'd probably be in an asylum right now if Josh hadn't interrupted me while I was shouting at her and made me come serve as backup for his little interrogation.»

I felt my mind beginning to reel again. «What about Richard?»

«What about him?»

«Does he have a double, too?»

«How should I know?» said Abby. «Josh didn't recruit him for backup; when you're trying to look intimidating in front of a Yeerk, you want deadly snakes and huge, six-legged things with scimitars on their noses, not big cows. You can ask him at the meeting, I guess, if you want to.»

«Oh,» I said. «Well, what about Anifal? Is there another one of him running around this forest?»

«Not so far as he can tell,» said Abby. «Which is fine with me. The fewer Andalites you have to deal with, the better, that's what I say.»

I ignored that last comment. I already knew that Abby wasn't a big fan of Andalites in general; that moment on Wills Lane, when Elfangor hesitated before letting her touch the morphing cube, seems to have made a big impression on her. The rest of what she said, though, was new to me – and, if possible, left me more baffled than before.

Okay, Abby, Josh, and I – and maybe Richard, too – all had doubles, but Anifal didn't. What was that supposed to mean? Were Andalites somehow immune from the whole reality-warping thing that was going around? Then why had Lingfeer and Orfand reacted the way they had?

I shook my head. No point in driving myself crazy trying to work everything out. Better to wait until the conference started, and then put all my questions in front of the others; then I might actually get some answers.

* * *

As we flew on through the woods, I started to notice a faint, white light up ahead. What it was, I had no idea, but it seemed to be coming from the clearing where the Ssstram ship was parked – and I was so on edge from this whole business that my first thought was that Josh had been killed, and his ghost was haunting the woods.

When we got into the clearing, though, Josh was still very much alive. He was sitting on a log next to the Ssstram ship, and Chester, with his hologram down, was standing behind him. Chester, it turned out, was the reason for the light; his steel-and-ivory body was giving off a soft glow that made him look almost like some surrealist portrait of a seraph. Androids, go figure.

"You two can demorph if you want," said Josh. "Elly's duplicate is sound asleep in the Ssstram ship's control room; apparently Chester knows this ancient Pemalite massage technique that renders a person unconscious without harming her."

"It was used on the old world mostly for therapeutic purposes," said Chester. "There's nothing like a _fitillikar_-induced dream to cure a bad case of melancholia. So if you were worrying about your fetch's mental health, Elly, worry no more."

«How did you know it was Elly and me?» said Abby, sounding surprised.

"Because," said Chester, with the naked-Chee version of a grin, "if one of you had been Richard, he wouldn't have been able to resist making some reference to the Vulcan sleep-hold just now."

«It's called the nerve pinch, you positronic plebeian,» came a familiar thought-speak voice, and two more Mexican free-tailed bats fluttered into the clearing.

"Aha," said Josh. "The gang's all here, then. Have fun escorting this two-headed lieutenant of mine, Anifal?"

«Yes, it was quite informative,» said one of the bats as he flapped down to the ground and started growing blue fur. «It seems that Richard's replica mistook him for a highly powerful being inhabiting a dimension well beyond mortal experience. He called it the Q-Continuum, I believe, although I was unable to determine what the Q stood for.»

"I wouldn't worry about it too much," said Josh. "We have rather more significant matters to discuss, as soon as you all get finished demorphing."

That sounded so ominous that I was half tempted to stay in morph for a while, but I knew when my brother was issuing a gentle command. The three of us descended and resumed our human forms, and Abby and Richard took seats on nearby stumps while I lay down on the ground.

Josh leaned back on his log and folded his hands. "All right, here's the position of affairs," he said. "As everybody here probably knows, Elly and I returned home this afternoon to find ourselves alone in a house with a Controller who was Elly's exact double. On the off chance that this person might know something about all the funny things that have been going on over the last few days, I… ah… escorted her out of the house and brought her to this clearing, where Abby, Anifal and I interrogated her as to what she knew about the 'Andalite' resistance on Earth."

"I was worrying about that," I confessed. "You basically told her you were part of the resistance; how did you ask her questions about it without giving the game away?"

«He didn't,» said Anifal. «I did.»

I turned to him with a frown. "You did?"

«It was actually a very well-thought-out plan on Prince Josh's part,» said Anifal. «He had Abby fly ahead and meet me in the clearing, and we were to get into battle morph and be ready for them. When they arrived, I was to play the part of the prince and order him into the ship, on the pretext that some equipment malfunction required his attention. Abby and I then performed the actual interrogation.»

"Huh," I said. "Well, that's neat, but it doesn't really answer my question. Why didn't my double get suspicious when you started asking her who you were?"

«I told her,» said Anifal, «that we were a special guerrilla force recently sent to Earth by the High Council. Our mission was to support the resistance already established on this planet, but we were under strict orders not to contact them directly. In order to gauge the effect they were having on the Yeerk Empire, therefore, our only recourse was to directly interrogate the Yeerks themselves. I endeavored to suggest that this course of action was highly disagreeable to us, but that we had no intention of failing in the mission with which the homeworld had entrusted us. I also suggested that a _sharbat_'s tusks were the sharpest natural weapons in the known Galaxy, and that even Andalites didn't know of an antidote for coral snake venom, so it would be most unwise of her not to cooperate with us.»

I arched an eyebrow. "And she bought all that?"

«Why should that surprise you, Elly?» said Anifal. «You of all people ought to know how convincing I can be when I set my mind to it.»

I remembered how I had once spent an entire day believing that Andalites were forbidden by their religion to submerge themselves in water without a companion, and smiled involuntarily. "Okay, fair enough," I said. "So, what did you find out?"

Anifal made a gesture of deference to Josh, who nodded and picked up the story. "Thanks to Anifal's powers of persuasion," he said, "Elly's duplicate agreed to tell us everything she knew about the 'Andalite bandits'. The results were… very interesting."

"That's putting it mildly," Abby muttered.

"The most significant point that emerged," said Josh, "was that, to the pseudo-Elly's certain knowledge, there were at least six members of the resistance, and likely as many as ten. The second most significant point was her list of their known battle morphs, which included a tiger, a wolf, a grizzly bear, an elephant, a gorilla, a hawk, and an unmorphed Andalite."

Richard and I both stared at him, Richard with his eyes bugged out and his mouth hanging open, and me with, I guess, a similar expression. Of all the animals on that list, the wolf was the only one that any of us had ever acquired, and Anifal had never gone into battle in his natural form.

"Among the other highlights of the evening," Josh continued, "were her statements that the resistance members hardly ever spoke to Yeerks, that they had disabled at least one ground-based Kandrona, and that they had never been seen anywhere in this part of the country. Oh, yes – and the leader of the Yeerk invasion on Earth isn't Visser Seven, it's our old friend Esplin Nine-Four-Double-Six."

Richard groaned softly. "I'm getting too old for this," he said.

"How did this happen?" I demanded. "All we did was fly out to Apollo and fail to acquire a pair of vanarges! We didn't open a _Sario Rip_, we didn't drink any sacred Ongachic waters, we didn't run into reality-warping aliens…"

"No," said Chester softly, "but we did use their starship."

That brought me up short. "You mean… you mean the Ssstram ship could have caused all this?"

"I don't mean anything, just yet," said Chester. "But there are certain aspects of the present situation, and certain peculiar features of Ssstram technology, that together bring thoughts to my mind that I haven't accessed in millennia. Vat Diglee's Echo Chamber, for instance."

"Say what?" said Abby.

Chester sighed. "I'm not sure I can fully explain it to you," he said. "Your race is still so new to real understanding of the physical universe; most of the ideas involved don't even have names in English yet. Still… you know what Zero-space is, right?"

"Um… yeah," said Abby. "It's the dimension where you can go faster than light."

"Uh-huh," said Chester. "And you know why that doesn't work in the regular universe, right?"

"Because Einstein said so," said Abby.

I think Chester would have rolled his eyes if he had had pupils at the time. "Yes," he said. "Very good. It's nice to see that kids these days still trust authority. But do you know _why_ Einstein said it wouldn't work?"

"Because his equations wouldn't have meaningful solutions if it did," Richard offered.

"Exactly," said Chester, pointing a clawed metal finger at him. "Thank you, Richard. Specifically, he said that the dilated time interval of a moving object differs from the proper time interval of a static observer by a factor of √(1/[1 – _v_^2/_c_^2]), and that, if _v_ were greater than _c_, that expression would have a complex value – which doesn't seem to have any meaning when applied to a linear vector quantity such as time."

I glanced around to see if anyone else had gotten any of that. Anifal was nodding calmly, as if what Chester was saying was the most obvious thing in the world, and Richard seemed to at least be following the train of thought, but Josh looked simply baffled, and Abby was getting that look she sometimes gets at poetry readings when a recitation goes beyond her tolerance level for hot air.

"_What?_" she demanded.

Chester sighed. "Never mind," he said. "Let's just say that in the normal world, if you go faster than the speed of light, you're no longer going forwards or backwards in time, you're going sideways – and since time doesn't have any sideways, in the normal world you can't go faster than the speed of light."

"Oh." Abby's face cleared. "Okay."

"But you can go faster than light in Z-space," Josh pointed out.

"Exactly," said Chester. "Which suggests that, in Z-space, sideways motion in time does have some meaning, if one could only figure out what. Various races have developed various solutions for that problem, but the one that my masters found most congenial was that Z-space, instead of being a singularity or an emission of our universe, was actually the common medium for an infinite number of universes, and that moving sideways in time meant traveling through all those universes' unique space-time continua."

The poetry-reading look started to come back to Abby's face, but, to me, what Chester was saying sounded familiar. "You mean Z-space is like the Wood between the Worlds?" I said. "Our universe is one pool, and Narnia's another pool five steps away?"

Chester hesitated. "Well, that was the theory for most of my masters' history," he said. "It was called the Galactic Model; the idea was that, just as the galaxy contains a whole bunch of distinct stars scattered throughout space, so Z-space contained a whole bunch of universes scattered throughout itself, none of them really dependent on any other. Just before the Howlers attacked, though, there was a scientist named Presellamaki-Hrudenterai Vat Diglee, who was fast becoming one of the major players in Pemalite physics, and he thought the Galactic Model was as cockeyed as the blueberry-muffin picture of the atom. It was too simplistic, he said; Z-space was more than just some big soup in which universes floated like so many _nakra_ beans. And so he developed what was called the Echo-Chamber Model."

"Which means what?" said Josh.

"That each universe in Z-space is almost an exact copy of each other universe," said Chester. "Not quite, of course, or they wouldn't be separate universes at all. But each time a sentient being is confronted with a choice, and performs an exercise of free will, it causes a ripple effect in the universe, with the events that would have happened if the being had decided otherwise being sort of shunted out of the time-stream – and Vat Diglee's theory was that, if the choice was significant enough, the rejected alternative took enough of the basic substance of the universe with it to form a new universe in Z-space."

Richard stared at him. "You're saying _choices_ create universes?"

"I'm not," said Chester. "Vat Diglee was."

"Uh-huh," said Richard. "And was he just an eccentric, or did all Pemalite physicists talk like theologians?"

"Not all planets have embraced the Earthly notion that science and philosophy are mutual enemies, Richard," said Chester coolly.

"I'm not saying they are," said Richard, "but they should at least be distinct subjects. I mean, come on, was he supposed to write equations using _f_ to represent free will?"

"No," said Chester with a small smile. "The traditional variable was more the equivalent of _p_."

Richard opened his mouth at that, but no words came out. Anifal took the opportunity to interject a question.

«Let me see if I understand, Chester,» he said. «This Vat Diglee believed that, if you entered an alternate universe, it would be the same so far as physical structure was concerned, but the history of its peoples would be vastly different?»

"Exactly," said Chester. "Somewhere out there, there's a universe where Kon Barga decided to kill Pel Nisku, where Sessagal-Junhyb-Eteri decided to ignore the falling _thumri_ blossom, where Ronald Reagan decided to stay in Hollywood. And, presumably, where Seerow-Iskillion-Matiss decided not to let the Yeerks know about Z-space travel, and the five of you are still regular kids on your respective planets."

He sighed, and turned to face the alien tree behind him. "And the Ssstram know about it," he said. "Life on their planet exists half in Z-space anyway; that's why they can turn their trees into starships with only a few modifications. It's only natural that their science should take the Echo Chamber for granted."

"Hang on a second," said Josh. "Are you saying that using a Ssstram starship automatically takes you into another universe?"

Chester shook his head. "No, I don't think so," he said. "That would mean that Captain Ffsssish and her crew originally came from another universe, in which case their account of the Yeerk War shouldn't have agreed with Anifal's so perfectly. I do think, though, that a Ssstram ship in Z-space is continually aware of the whole Echo Chamber, and that, under the right conditions, it can forget which universe it's supposed to return to and return to another one instead."

"What conditions?" said Josh.

"Yes, that's the $64,000 question, isn't it?" said Chester with a frown. "The way I was operating that ship, it should have worked. Nothing short of a Z-space irruption should have been able to mess it up."

Richard cocked his head. "A Z-space irruption?"

"Yeah," said Chester. "Something drawing on Z-space from within the ship while it was in Z-space itself. If there had been a Helmacron ship in the supply closet, for instance, and it had decided to activate its engines at some point during our trip, that might have fouled things up, but…"

"Morphing," I said suddenly, with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Chester glanced around. "Pardon?"

"Morphing," I repeated. "That uses Z-space, doesn't it? Cascading effects or something?"

Chester considered. "Yes, I suppose it does," he said. "Yes, that would presumably have done the trick, if any of you had morphed anything during the…"

He trailed off, and all six pairs of eyes in the clearing turned to stare at me. I cringed, and looked fixedly down at the ground.

"You did the Gedd, didn't you?" said Richard. "That's why you weren't disappointed by its instincts. You'd already morphed it!"

"I'm sorry!" I said. "It had been three days since I acquired it; I didn't think it would cause a problem…" I sounded pathetic, even to me.

"Do you mean to tell me," Abby demanded, "that I spent half an hour trying to convince myself that she wasn't me because you couldn't wait five days to morph a Gedd?"

"I'm sorry," I said again, feeling the tears beginning to come to my eyes. "Really, I'm sorry." I raised my head and stared at Josh, hoping that some fragment of the tender, solicitous older brother I had spent the evening with was behind those hazel eyes.

"I'm sorry," I whispered one more time.

Josh sighed. "Well, I can't say I don't wish you'd restrained yourself," he said, "but I can understand what was going through your mind." He smiled a thin smile. "Don't worry about it, Elly. I'll take the sister I grew up with over a perfect soldier any day."

I swallowed. No one could make forgiveness sound like condemnation the way Josh could.

But what did I expect? I knew how he felt about self-indulgent morphing. If I'd behaved myself – if I'd followed the Morph Force's unwritten rules – then none of this would have happened, and Josh wouldn't have had to risk his life saving me from my double. I deserved all the condemnation he could pour on me, and then some.

"Thanks, Josh," I said, rising to my feet. "Excuse me, I… I need to… I… just give me a few seconds."

And without waiting for his permission to leave, I ran out of the clearing, groped through the woods until I found a nice big paper birch, leaned my head against it, and sobbed into its bark for nearly a minute. I wasn't sure why, but I couldn't have stopped myself anymore than I could have breathed in Z-space.

"She really takes these things hard, doesn't she?" I heard Richard say.

"She doesn't like to let us down," Josh answered. "She's really a very good person – probably better than any of the rest of us. It's a shame this war's been so hard on her." He paused, then added, "But then, I suppose war's always hardest on good people."


	19. Loophole

After a while, I ran out of tears, went back into the clearing, and lay back down in my spot on the ground, trying to ignore the annoyed and/or sympathetic glances of the other Morph Forcers. "Okay," I said. "So we're stuck in a parallel universe because I had an itchy morphing finger. Now what do we do?"

"Isn't it obvious?" said Abby. "We hop back into the Ssstram ship right now, have Chester take us back into Z-space, have you morph the Gedd again, and then we'll be right back where we started."

Chester nodded approvingly. "A beautifully simple and elegant plan, Abby," he said. "Unfortunately, if it worked that way, we'd never have had this problem in the first place."

Abby blinked. "Why not?"

"Because," said Chester, "you're operating from the assumption that one Z-space irruption caused this problem, and so a second one ought to fix it. But there's already been a second Z-space irruption: namely, when Elly demorphed from Gedd back to human. If Ssstram mechanics worked the way you're describing, that should have sent us back to our own universe – instead of which, it just sent us into a third universe even further removed from our own than the one her first morph sent us into."

Josh frowned. "You mean this universe is two choices away from ours, not just one?"

"Exactly," said Chester. "And if we go back into Z-space and have Elly morph and demorph again, we'll wind up in a universe that's two choices away from this one – which means that, in all probability, it will be _four_ choices away from ours. Of course, we _might_ wind up in our own universe again, but the odds against that happening are probably decillions to one."

«Couldn't we wind up in this same universe again?» Anifal wanted to know. «It seems to me that, if Elly's morph takes us into a universe that differs from this one by one certain choice, her demorph might take us into a universe that differs from that one by the same choice – which could only be this one.»

Chester considered. "It's possible, yes," he said. "In fact, it's probably a lot more likely than getting back to our home universe. It's still a matter of a quadrillion or so to one against, though."

«Or else,» Anifal continued reflectively, «one of the irruptions could undo one of the previous changes, and the other could introduce a new one – so that we would still be two universes away from our home universe, but we would also be two universes away from this one…»

"Yes, yes," said Josh irritably. "There are all kinds of places we _could_ end up – but there's only one place we _want _to end up, so let's focus on that, shall we?"

"Do we _have_ to go back to our own universe?" I said suddenly. "I mean, is it necessary?"

Josh gave me a funny look. "Well," he said, "unless you'd rather have the Earth in our universe get overrun by the Yeerks because we're not there to protect it…"

"Oh," I said. "Good point."

"Of course," said Richard thoughtfully, "it's not as though this universe's Earth is any less deserving of protectors than ours…"

"It already has protectors," said Abby. "Remember the tiger, the gorilla, and the unmorphed Andalite?"

"Oh, yeah. What's the deal with those guys, anyway?"

"Who knows?" said Chester. "Maybe this universe's Elfangor gave them the morphing power the same way ours did with you. Maybe some other renegade Andalite gave it to them. Maybe they really are stranded Andalites, the way the Yeerks think. Whatever they are, it's not our problem right now."

Talking about Andalites brought a sudden question to my mind, and I raised my hand hesitantly. "Um… Chester?"

Chester glanced down. "Yes, Elly?"

"I was just wondering about something," I said. "You said that Z-space is the common medium of all the different universes, right?"

"Right."

"Then how come the people from the different universes don't discover each other when they go into Z-space? Shouldn't the Dome ships from our universe occasionally run into their counterparts from other universes and wonder what's going on?"

"No, of course not," said Chester. "Each universe has a separate vibratory structure that renders its matter imperceptible to material objects from other universes. Didn't I mention that already?"

He glanced around at our uniformly blank expressions. "No, I guess I didn't. Okay, just take my word for it. That's why the Ssstram ship's sensors couldn't locate those waste capsules we flushed out: the sensors and the capsules were no longer vibrating in the same pattern. That in itself should have told me what was going on, now that I think about it…"

"Hang on," said Richard. "You mean the capsules didn't change universes when the ship did?"

"Of course not," said Chester. "It's only the ship itself that changed its vibratory structure; nothing _inside_ the ship was sensitive to Z-space irruptions in the same way."

"But you said stuff from one universe couldn't perceive stuff from other universes," said Richard, "so how come we could still perceive the ship, if we didn't change vibrations when it did? For that matter, how come we can perceive anything in this universe, if we're still vibrating the way our old universe does?"

"How should I know?" said Chester. "We're in a situation that no one in recorded history has ever been in before; we have to expect our experiences to be slightly at variance with theory. Probably it has something to do with universal containment; the vibratory structure of this universe overwhelms and overrides any variant vibratory structures within it. Maybe if we were existing independently in Z-space, the way a ship or a universe does, then we could perceive other portions of our universe, but evidently anything less than that…"

Josh suddenly whirled around and stared at him. "Repeat that," he said.

Chester hesitated. "Repeat what?"

"What you just said," said Josh. "About being able to perceive our universe if we were floating in Z-space."

"Uh… probably we would," said Chester. "Since we're still attuned to our own universe's vibratory structure, we would be able to interact with ships and emissions from our universe, while those from this one would be imperceptible to us."

"And if we could turn into starships," said Josh, "and jump into Z-space and back out again, would we come out in this universe or ours?"

"Ours, of course," said Chester. "But how do you propose to turn into starships? I mean, I know your morphing power is good, but it's not that good; a thing still has to be alive for you to…" He trailed off, and stared at the broadly smiling Josh. "Oh," he said. "Oh, I see."

"What?" said Richard.

Instead of answering, Chester slowly turned his head all the way around (a capacity I hadn't realized he had up to that point), and the four of us followed his gaze to the huge, alien tree standing behind him.

All three of us who had jaws dropped them. "You cannot be serious," said Abby.

"Why not?" said Josh.

"You expect us to morph _the Ssstram ship_?" said Richard.

"Not all of us," said Josh. "That'd just be overkill. Better if just one of us morphs the ship, and the rest of us hitch a ride on him. Or her, as the case may be," he added, with a significant look at me.

I grinned, and nodded. "Oh, yeah," I said. "Definitely her."

Abby shook her head. "This has got to be the craziest idea you've ever come up with, Josh," she said.

"I wouldn't deny that," said Josh. "I don't see why it shouldn't work, though… unless our resident Andalite knows of some technical objection?" he added, glancing at Anifal.

«Not at all,» said Anifal. «A number of Andalites have morphed trees, and have suffered no ill effects.» He hesitated. «Of course, those were the semi-sentient trees of the Andalite homeworld; an alien tree might carry more risk for its morpher…»

"Not this one," said Chester. "The Ssstram ship has as high a degree of sentience as any _therant_ that ever bloomed; it has to, if it's going to respond to its pilot's commands. I wouldn't say there's any risk at all that someone who morphs it is going to wind up in a permanent vegetative state – except literally, of course, if she exceeds the two-hour limit."

Josh frowned. "Yes, that's a point worth considering," he said. "Would Elly have to spend more than two hours in morph in order to make this mission work?"

Chester laughed. "Not likely," he said. "All we have to do is get far enough from Earth to safely make a quick Z-space shift, then come back. Total round trip shouldn't be more than 600 miles – and if I can't take you 600 miles in two hours, I'd better go back to Boulder."

"You went to Boulder?" I said.

"Well, not to the Academy itself, per se," said Chester, "but I was with the Lewis and Clark Expedition when they went through the Canyon. Anyway, don't worry about the time factor."

"Well, terrific," said Abby. "So Elly acquires the ship, morphs it, we jump in, Chester takes us up, we hop back to our own universe, and we come back down again, all in under two hours. We'll be home before midnight."

«Yes,» said Anifal quietly, «it is a very elegant plan. There only remains one problem. What do we do with the Controller of Elly's counterpart?»

Josh blinked. "Oh, yeah," he said. "I'd forgotten about her."

"That shouldn't be a problem, should it?" said Richard. "If this nerve-pinch technique of Chester's is as effective as he says it is, we should be able to carry her back to Josh and Elly's house while she's still asleep and slip her into her bed. She'll think it weird when she wakes up, of course, and if she's really clever she might figure out that we weren't real Andalites after all, but what does that matter? We'll be two universes away by that point."

«I see,» said Anifal. «You were intending, then, to allow the Yeerk in her to remain alive?»

Richard blinked. "Well, yeah," he said. "Is there a problem with that?"

«I would not know,» said Anifal. «I am neither a philosopher nor a Pemalite physicist. I would like to point out, however, that I never expected to hear one of our company propose abandoning Elly to the Yeerks.»

"Abandoning Elly?" said Richard. "We're not abandoning Elly, we're…"

«We are proposing to leave her counterpart in this universe under the control of a Yeerk,» said Anifal. «Whether that counterpart is merely a replica of her, or shares in her own being in some inscrutable way, was not made clear to me by Chester's exposition of the Echo-Chamber Theory, and I would venture to say that Chester himself does not understand the theory well enough to answer the question meaningfully. But do any of us truly believe that the Elly who lies in the Ssstram ship is less Elly than the Elly lying here with us?»

"Well, they can't both be the same person, can they?" said Richard. "Weren't you the one who said that the same person couldn't exist in two places at once, or they'd annihilate each other? You know, back when we were doing our little hop-through-the-Age-of-Mammals routine?"

«That was a theoretical extrapolation from _Sario-Rip_ physics,» said Anifal. «It does not even begin to apply to this situation. Andalite knowledge is…» He hesitated, like he was about to make an embarrassing confession. «Andalite knowledge is not equipped to handle a question of this kind. Any opinion I were to offer would be based solely on my own inclinations – and I submit, Prince Josh,» he said, turning to face the log where my brother was sitting, «that this matter is of too great moment to be left to individual prejudices. To leave a sentient being to the Yeerks when we had reason to believe that she was, in some sense, one of our own number – I do not believe I could show my face on my homeworld again if I knew I had consented to such a thing.»

"It's a matter of honor, you mean," said Josh.

Anifal nodded.

Josh nodded, too. He understands honor. "Okay, then," he said, "so what alternative did you have in mind?"

«Starve the Yeerk out,» said Anifal bluntly. «Confine her to this clearing for the next three days, or however long it may have been since her last feeding. She must be expecting some such thing as it is; surely she does not believe that a secret Andalite guerrilla force would tell a Yeerk civilian of its existence, and then let her free to run to the Visser with the news.»

"How can we do that?" said Abby. "I mean, there's Chester…"

"What about me?" said Chester.

"Well, wouldn't your programming prevent you from getting involved in something like this?"

"I am not involved in it," said Chester. "If the five of you decide to wantonly murder a sentient being for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, that's your lookout. _I_ am merely waiting for one of you to morph the big blue tree so we can leave."

There was such icy disapproval in his tone that I shivered. Richard, though, laughed aloud. "Man alive, Chester," he said, "your doublethink methods put the Zeroth Law to shame, you know that?"

Chester disdained to reply.

"Well, okay, then," said Abby, "but what do you expect us to do about the other Elly's family? I mean, surely they're going to notice if she disappears for three days…"

«Why should she disappear for three days?» said Anifal. «All we require is that this universe's Elly not leave this clearing until the Yeerk inside her is dead. There is nothing preventing some other Elly from taking her place – particularly not when another Elly has, in fact, passed herself off as her not three hours ago.» His eyestalks turned significantly in my direction.

Josh raised his eyebrows. "So that's your plan, is it, Anifal?" he said. "Elly goes off and pretends to be a Controller for a day or two, while the rest of us patrol this clearing in various morphs and wait for her Yeerk duplicate to Kandrona-starve to death?"

«That is the essence of it, Prince Josh,» said Anifal.

"Ah," said Josh.

There was a moment or two of silence.

"Well, what are you waiting for?" said Josh. "Get in bat morph, and go take her back to the house."

* * *

**Author's note:** I would like, at this point, to extend my most effusive thanks to Victim-of-His-Own-Design. This entire story would have gone in a completely different, and probably much less plausible, direction if it hadn't been for the reviews he left for chapters 7 and 9. They inspired me to play around with the nature of the Ssstram ship, to take the idea of its actually being a tree seriously, and before I knew where I was I had a much more elegant solution to the central logistical dilemma of this story than I had originally intended. (Let this be a lesson to anyone who thinks that anonymous reviewers are always slothful and malevolent lowlifes.)


	20. Caution

Anifal and I didn't say much on the flight back to my house. I'm not sure why, but Anifal doesn't talk much around me; maybe he figures I'm just too much of a human to be worth trying to communicate with. When we do have a conversation, I'm generally the one who initiates it – and, in this case, I had too much on my mind to really try.

What Anifal had said back in the clearing, about me and the pseudo-Elly sharing a nature, had really gotten to me, somehow. It had made me think of all those other universes (decillions of them, Chester had said) that had replicas of me in them: were all of them me? Was my soul, my essence, everything that made me _me_, somehow spread out like butter over a million billion girls on a million billion Earths? When I got to heaven, was St. Peter going to say, "I'm sorry, miss, you're going to have to wait to get in until the rest of you get here"?

No, all right, that was silly – but still, it was kind of a disturbing thought. I mean, I had always been taught that your choices mattered, that a man would suffer loss if his building burned – and now Chester was saying, as far as I could tell, that, if a man built something flammable, God would just spin off another universe in which he built something that wasn't flammable. That didn't seem right, somehow.

I shook my head and tried to focus on the woods. Judging by the echolocation pictures I was picking up, we were right near the edge of them; the house should be coming up any moment.

Yes, there it was, looming at the top of the hill just beyond the last of the trees. I aimed a supersonic squeak at it, and its image leaped into focus; I could hear its loose shingles, the furnishings on the porch, even the sprig of birch leaves that Daddy had stuck to the door that May. It was exactly the way I'd always known it – which was creepy, of course, since I knew I'd never been there before today.

The two of us fluttered up to the porch roof and latched our wings and feet onto the rain gutter. «Will you need help opening your window?» said Anifal.

«No, I think I can handle it,» I said. It was sweet of him to offer, but somehow I didn't think that Andalites, with their four legs and their skinny little arms, were exactly the species you wanted for a job that involved standing on a roof and pushing a window open from the outside.

«Very well,» said Anifal. «Then I suppose I will leave you now.»

He didn't, though. For about fifteen seconds he just sat there, scraping at the shingles with his wingtip, as though there was something else he wanted to say, but he wasn't sure how to say it.

«Elly, I believe I ought to apologize to you,» he said. «I should, I am aware, have discussed this plan with you before I proposed it to the others; it was wrong of me to volunteer you for this task without your consent. It was merely that I felt the subject had to be brought up before you went to acquire the Ssstram ship, and I could see no graceful way of…»

«Oh, don't worry about it, Anifal,» I said. «I don't mind.»

«You ought to,» said Anifal. «I am not your prince. I have no authority to put you in the way of danger.»

«Danger?» I repeated. «How can this mission be dangerous? All I'm doing is filling my double's place for a few…»

«You are impersonating a subject of the Yeerk Empire,» said Anifal. «For a host life-form to attempt that is, to a Yeerk, the most shockingly audacious crime conceivable. If any actual Yeerk should learn about it, you would at the mercy of the Yeerk High Command within the hour – and if the former Visser Three is indeed still leading the Earth invasion in this universe…»

He didn't have to finish the sentence. I remembered Nelam One-Four-Four, the Yeerk who had helped us during the Conduit mission; I remembered his terrified description of all the things that his boss did to Yeerks who assisted Andalites. I could just imagine what a human would be in for at his hands.

«Well, just the same, don't worry about me,» I said. «_I'm_ not worrying about me. I'm actually kind of looking forward to it, for some reason.»

«That could make it all the more dangerous,» said Anifal.

I frowned. «Why?»

He hesitated. «I am not sure,» he said, «but I cannot help feeling that there is a peculiar peril about this task of pretending to be yourself. We are, after all, preparing to leave you alone for as much as three days, which you will spend living exactly as you used to live before Prince Elfangor gave you the morphing power. It is so easy to get lost in one's own past – I cannot help but wish you approached the duty more reluctantly.»

I smiled – which was probably a hideous sight, given my bat mouth, but I meant it nicely. «Anifal,» I said, «honestly, I think your nerves are just on edge from spending a week in that tiny little ship, and now you're seeing extra danger in everything. I really don't think I'm going to have much of a problem.»

Anifal sighed. «If that is the way you feel, there is probably no point in attempting to convince you otherwise,» he said. «I would ask, though, that you endeavor to be careful. We would none of us like to lose you.»

And with that, he dropped off the gutter and flew back into the wood.

* * *

Bats are not graceful animals. It took me nearly a minute of groping and flailing to get into a position where I could demorph without falling off the roof. The rest of the operation, though, went as smoothly as I could ask for, and within five minutes I was back in my nightgown and under the covers.

And a good thing, too, because I had barely settled my head onto the pillow than my bedroom door creaked open, and Josh – the other Josh – called, "Elly, can I come in?"

"Hmm?" I said vaguely, already starting to drift off. "Oh, yeah, sure."

The door creaked open, and Josh poked his head in. I didn't sit up to look at him, for fear that in the light from the hallway he'd be able to see the little bits of bark that were still stuck to my bangs – and, of course, because I was really comfortable in my current position, and I knew I'd spoil it if I moved.

"You okay in here, Ells?" said Josh.

"Me?" I murmured. "Yeah, I'm fine. Why shouldn't I be?"

Josh shrugged. "I don't know. I just heard you opening and closing your window, and I wondered what was going on."

"Oh, that," I said. "I was just getting a little hot, and I thought I'd get some air in. Then I changed my mind."

It was a pretty pathetic explanation, but I couldn't think of anything better, and I was banking on the other-world me having the same reputation for inexplicable eccentricity that I did.

Evidently, she did, because Josh nodded as though what I'd said made perfect sense. "Okay, then," he said. "Sorry to bother you."

"That's okay," I said.

"Save me a dream," said Josh.

There was a pause.

"I said, save me a dream," Josh repeated.

"Oh," I said. "Um… why, is one in danger?"

Josh grinned. "'Night."

"'Night."

Josh closed the door, and I snuggled deeper into the pillow with a feeling of renewed contentment. "Save me a dream" was something Mom used to say when she tucked me in; the response was something I had come up with when I was a smart-aleck five-year-old. Josh had loved it, and it had become one of our inside jokes, but he hadn't used it – in our world, at least – in a long time. It was nice to hear it again.

_You're crazy, Anifal, _I thought as I drifted off into Nemo-land. _This mission is going to be a piece of cake._


	21. Morning

I'm not really much of a morning person. Beds, to my mind, are made for plopping into at around ten o'clock when you're completely exhausted, and then lolling around lazily in for most of the morning. My dad, who's more of an early-to-bed-early-to-rise kind of person, thinks this is the mark of a serious character defect, so even in summer I try to at least set my alarm clock as a sort of gesture, but this night I guess I forgot, and so I didn't wake up the next morning until the eight-o'-clock sunshine came streaming through my window.

For a moment, I started to panic. Why had Josh let me sleep in so late? We were in the middle of a mission, weren't we? Why hadn't he come in at around six, given me a gentle shake on the shoulder, and whispered that we needed to fly out to the community center and take out a rampaging Taxxon or something?

Then I remembered: this was my mission. The rest of the Morph Force was depending on me to lie around in bed till eight, to pour too much milk on my cereal at breakfast, to lose to the parallel-universe Josh at Take One – in short, to be Elly for three days.

Well, no one's ever going to accuse me of disloyalty to my comrades, so I rolled over, cuddled Jacques a little closer to my chest, and drifted back into that not-quite-awake state that Saturday mornings were made for.

* * *

When I finally did get up and go downstairs, of course, Daddy made a big fuss about it. "Ah!" he said, raising his hands and making his eyes go wide. "The Princess of Dreamings condescends at last to grace us with her presence. Permit me to welcome thee to the waking lands, O fairest of maidens."

I just smiled and took the Honey Nut Cheerios down from the cupboard. "That's nice," I said. "Are you going to use it in the new book?" (My dad's a professional fantasy writer; he's written five novels about this wizard named Bellman, who works for some imaginary kingdom's royal family and solves problems for them.)

Daddy sighed, and turned back to his computer screen. "Not any time soon," he said. "Right now I'm at one of those tedious stages where I don't have time for rhetoric; it's all I can do just to keep the plot moving forward. I still have no idea how I'm going to get Princess Nicolette out of the Fligart Swamp."

I blinked. "What's Nicolette doing in the Fligart Swamp?"

"If I told you, you wouldn't have to read the book, now would you?"

I sighed. My dad has this weird aversion to letting me know the plots of his books before they're published; I think he's worried that I'd run off and tell Angela, and Angela would tell her father, and he'd tell the book critic at the newspaper where he works, and so on, and, by the time the book actually came out, everyone in America would already know how Princess Nicolette got into the Fligart Swamp. I don't know how he thinks A. A. Milne got away with what he did; maybe he figures that Christopher Robin was half asleep when he heard the stories anyway, so it didn't really count.

Anyway, I didn't have too long to brood about it, because I'd just put the milk on my cereal when I heard the toilet flush, and Josh – the parallel one – came out of the downstairs bathroom. "Hey, Elly," he said. "Not a fake one, like Sirius Black."

I stared at him for a second, then realized this must be a Take One clue. "Um… letters?"

"T to M," he said, with that little smirk that says he's come up with a real stumper this time. (What makes it all the more irritating is that he's usually right.)

I went through all the movies that I could think of that had T's in the title. _The Two Mowers_,_ Mime Bandits_,_ Mender Mercies_… but no, that wouldn't be it. Josh wouldn't be so proud of himself if the change had been in the first letter of a word; we both agreed that changing first letters was the mark of a second-rate Take-One-er. (Though if the result was cute enough, the way Mom's "Sam the Lion's less-successful cousin – S to D" had been, we were sometimes willing to make an exception.)

Let's see. _The Passion of the Chrism_… _Beam the Devil_… _Bram Smoker's Dracula_… None of those sounded like they had much to do with Sirius Black. I decided to change the subject. "So, what are we doing this afternoon?" I said, stirring my cereal as nonchalantly as I could.

Josh shrugged. "Ask Mom," he said. "She's back in the master bedroom with a pile of probate briefs; apparently a whole bunch of the old people in the county decided to die this week."

"Oh."

My disappointment must have showed on my face, because Josh frowned and asked if there was anything wrong. I smiled, and tried to make a joke out of it. "Well, you know," I said, "it's always a little sad when people die, isn't it?"

Josh snorted. "Well, their heirs seem to have gotten over it pretty fast," he said. "And you'd better, too, or that cereal of yours is going to be a puddle of mush before too long."

He was right about that, and it shut me up pretty effectively for a while. Once I'd finished eating, though, I decided to go back to Mom's room and see if I could talk her into changing her plans for the day. After all, what's the point of having three days to relive your pre-war childhood if your mom blows them reading legal briefs?

* * *

Mom looked up and smiled at me as I entered the room. "Morning, Elly," she said. "What brings you in here?"

I shrugged. "Oh, nothing," I said. "I was just, you know…"

Mom arched an eyebrow. "Let me guess," she said. "You woke up wanting to do something special today, for no better reason than 'just because', and so you came in here looking to see if I would be done with these (she gestured to the pile of briefs on the bed in front of her) early enough for us to visit the botanical gardens before they close at four o'clock. Am I right?"

I love my mom. "Um… yeah, basically."

Mom sighed. "Well, in that case, the answer is 'I don't know'," she said. "Most of these cases are fairly straightforward, but there are a couple I'm going to need to spend some time on. Now, I started early today, so there's a chance I'll be finished by lunchtime, but I can't promise anything."

"Okay," I said. It was a reasonable answer, and more than I had any real right to expect. There was no good reason why it should have made my heart sink the way it did, so I tried to keep my voice steady and not let it develop the whine it wanted to.

But my mom didn't get to be a judge by not knowing when someone's keeping their feelings back. Her eyes softened slightly, and she crooked a finger at me as I was turning to leave. "Come here, Ells," she said.

I went over and sat on the bed, and Mom put her arm around me and started stroking my hair with her fingernails. "I said I can't promise that I'll be done in time," she said, "and that's the truth. But, because you're my little girl, and because you don't ask for this sort of thing nearly as often as you used to, and–" she smiled "–because, to tell the truth, I wouldn't mind spending a few hours with the turtles myself, I will promise to go as fast as I possibly can. All right?"

I smiled. "All right."

"Okay, then," said Mom. "Go find something to do for a few hours, and I'll let you know what the score is at lunchtime."

* * *

I'm not sure why Mom's promise made such a difference to me. After all, all she had really said was "I don't know" again, and it wasn't as though I had doubted that she would try to get done with her work quickly – or that I was her little girl, for that matter. But maybe I just wanted to hear her say it.

What I hadn't wanted to hear her say was that thing about me not asking to go to the botanical gardens as often as I used to. It was probably true – the Yeerk me had to have better things to do than wander around looking at ginkgo trees – but I didn't really want to be reminded that this version of my mom had been cuddling a Yeerk me for the last few months. I didn't want to think about Yeerks at all – or Andalites, or parallel universes, or failed acquisition missions, or anything like that. I wanted to think about whether I had fed Lapkin that morning, and when I would be getting together with Angela again, and whether I wanted to be a Poor Clare or a Benedictine when I grew up, and everything else that Mom and Dad and this Josh thought I spent my time thinking about. After all, wasn't that what I was supposed to be doing?

But, even with that, I still felt pretty good. In fact, when I went back upstairs and passed Josh in the loft, I felt so good that I didn't mind saying, "Okay, I give up. What's the answer?"

"_True Grim_," said Josh proudly.

I groaned. "Of course."


	22. Afternoon

"Okay, I've got one," I said.

"Shoot," said Josh.

We were leaning on the railing by the turtle pond, dropping leaves into the water and watching two box turtles sun themselves on a fallen log. (Mom hadn't quite been finished by lunchtime, but she had said she could finish the last set of notes in the car if Dad was willing to drive.) It was about two in the afternoon: the sun was beating down overhead, the bees were buzzing around the turtles' heads, and the breeze was blowing delicious smells toward us from the nearby grove of dogwood trees. In other words, it was a perfectly ridiculous time for me to be trying to do anything so wakeful as think of Take One clues, but Josh's easy victory earlier had rankled me, and I wanted to at least tie him before the day was out.

"A priestess of Juno in ancient Rome converts to Christianity," I said. "Describe the path she has traveled. E to A."

Josh thought for a moment. "Juno... could it be _From Hera to Eternity_?" he inquired.

I groaned. "It's not fair," I said. "You're too good at this. You're too good at everything; there's nothing I can beat you at."

"That's not true," said Josh. "You always beat me at double solitaire."

I'd forgotten about that. It had been a while since Josh and I had played double solitaire, back in the other universe. "Well, that doesn't really count, though," I said. "I mean, it's not a really important thing to be good at."

Josh laughed. "Some people wouldn't think being able to come up with mutant movie titles was especially important, either," he said. "You just think it's impressive because it's hard for you – and, conversely, since you've always been able to see that your three of spades goes on the two a second before the other person does, you think it can't be all that big a deal."

"Well," I said with a grin, "if you think it's so important, think you're up for a match this evening after we get home?"

Josh looked surprised. "Don't you have Sharing stuff to do?"

I shrugged. "Some, yeah, but nothing I can't put off."

Josh shook his head. "Man, Elly," he said, "you really are in a laid-back mood today, aren't you?"

I smiled. "I had kind of an epiphany while you guys were gone yesterday," I said. "I'd rather not go into details, but let's just say that the Sharing might be looming a little smaller in my life from now on."

"Mm," said Josh. "Well, that would be all right."

The two of us stood there in silence for a moment, watching our leaves bob on the surface of the pond. Then Josh straightened himself. "Well," he said, "I suppose I should go catch up with Mom and Dad, just to reassure them that we haven't fallen in or anything. You want to come with me, or did you plan to linger for a while yet?"

"Oh, you go ahead," I said. "I'll catch up eventually."

"Okay," he said, and sauntered slowly down the path toward Ross's Weeping Willow. (That's probably the most famous tree in the park; it was planted in 1862 by the mayor of our town, Elisha F. Ross, after his son died at the Battle of Antietam.)

I sighed and turned back to the pond. A third turtle had joined the first two on the log, and the three of them together made the best picture of sheer solidity that I'd ever seen. You got the feeling that the entire botanical gardens could catch fire around them, and they would just glance lazily up at it, shrug their shells, and go back to the nothing they were doing.

_No wonder people used to think the earth was balanced on the back of a giant turtle,_ I thought. _I'd trust one of those guys to hold my planet any day of the week. _I remembered the sight of the stars from the Ssstram ship's porthole when we had arrived at Apollo on Wednesday, and how serene and confident they too had seemed. Stars or turtles: there really wasn't much to choose between them.

_Except, of course,_ I added mentally, _that you can morph a turtle._

I should have known better than to let myself think that. As soon as the concept was in my mind, I realized that I _wanted_ to morph a turtle: that being the fourth motionless reptile on that log was the most enjoyable thing I could imagine. It was lucky that I was in a public place, or I would probably try to actually do it.

Although, really, it wasn't nearly as public a place as it might have been. Hardly anybody was at the botanical gardens that day (not surprising, considering the heat; probably they were all at home with the air-conditioning turned up), so there was hardly any risk of my being seen... and there was a spot by the dogwoods where I could leave my clothes without them getting wet...

_Get a grip, Elly,_ I told myself firmly. _You know Josh wouldn't approve of your doing this. It's way too risky..._

_No riskier than all the rest of the stuff I've done in the Morph Force,_ I answered.

_Well, maybe not... but still, you remember what happened the last time you morphed without authorization._

_What does that have to do with it? _I demanded. _We're not in Z-space now. Are you trying to tell me that this entire universe will collapse around my ears if I morph one of those turtles? If so, we're in trouble, since I've already morphed five times since I arrived in this universe – and who knows how many the others have done by now._

_But you haven't _acquired_ any morphs since you arrived in this universe, _I pointed out. _Are you sure that putting a little bit of this universe inside yourself isn't going to cause any problems? Maybe it'll change your vibrational whatever-it-is, and you'll be stuck in this universe for the rest of your life._

_Then what's the point of Chester's plan? _I thought irritably. _The Ssstram ship is part of this universe now, too; isn't that what he said? If I can't acquire animals from this universe without getting stuck here, then we might as well get comfy and wait for the tiger and the unmorphed Andalite to find us. Besides, your vibrational structure isn't encoded in your DNA, anyway._

_Just the same, I don't think you ought to..._

_Oh, shut up,_ I snapped. _If I spent my whole life listening to you, I'd never do anything. I've had a very long week, and I'm entitled to a little bit of a break. So there._

I really am an idiot sometimes.

* * *

I assume the turtle went into the usual trance when I acquired it, but I'm not really sure. When you get right down to it, what's the difference between being motionless and glassy-eyed because you're being acquired, and being motionless and glassy-eyed because you're a turtle? Anyway, that part of it wasn't a problem.

As soon as I had the turtle's DNA in me, I tiptoed over to the shadowy spot I had seen in the dogwood grove. Once I was there, I pulled off my blouse and skirt and stuffed them in a pile by the base of a nearby tree. (My glasses I slipped into the special, skin-tight pocket I had sewn for them onto the bodice of my leotard – not that they wouldn't have been safe with the other stuff, but, when you've stepped on your glasses as many times as I have, you get jumpy about just leaving them on the ground and walking away.) Then I slipped behind the tree so as not to be seen by anyone coming up the path, took a deep breath, clenched my fists, and focused on the turtle.

The morph started on my face this time, with my eyes widening and sprouting a sort of filmy covering in place of eyelids, my lips stiffening and sharpening into a beak, and my whole head shriveling up and being covered with leathery skin. That part wasn't so bad (though anyone watching would probably have been seriously freaked out by it), but when my legs suddenly splayed out and lost about three-quarters of their length, that caused a little bit of a problem.

I tried to cling to the trunk of the tree, but that particular dogwood had annoyingly smooth bark, and my hands didn't have claws on them yet that I could drive into the wood. I lost my grip and fell flat on the ground, unable to get up again – which meant, of course, that anyone who happened to walk by the pond at that moment would have seen a mutant girl with a turtle's head lying on her stomach in the dogwood grove.

There was only one thing that could help me now. _Shrink,_ I told myself frantically. _Shrink. Get smaller._

I've never been sure whether you can direct a morph by focusing really urgently on one part of it. Ordinarily, of course, a morph happens whatever way it feels like happening, and the morpher doesn't have any say about it – but I've noticed that sometimes, when it's really vital to my well-being that one change happen before the others, the morph has an uncanny way of doing what I need it to do. I tried to ask Anifal about this once, but all I got was a reminiscence about the time when he got to see the great artistic morpher Frolis-Eshapur-Something in one of her last performances before her death.

But, whatever the reason for it is – whether I'm a latent _estreen_ or whether God looks after fools and Morph Forcers – it worked this time. Instead of growing a shell or restructuring its innards, the next thing my body did was to contract itself in about eight seconds from fifty-five inches long to about seven – short enough to be hidden by the trunk of the tree.

I breathed a silent prayer of thanks as the rest of the changes occurred: the scales lacing over my skin, the shell and the plastron wrapping around me like a blanket, and that useless little tail sprouting from my behind. (Why did God give turtles tails, anyway? Probably because all the other quadrupeds had them, and He didn't want to mess up His pattern.) I waited until I was indistinguishable from the turtle I had acquired, and then started moving slowly toward the pond.

* * *

It took me a long time to get there: my legs were small and clunky, and my shell was heavier than I had expected. Still, I didn't mind. The pond wasn't going anywhere, and in the meantime I had the sun on my shell and damp grass under my feet. It was hard to believe I'd ever wanted anything else.

I wondered what the others were doing right now. They couldn't all be living on the Ssstram ship: there'd be too much risk of my double's Controller figuring out that they weren't Andalites. (Unless they'd already let her know that, on the theory that it didn't matter since she wasn't going to live long enough to tell the Visser. That didn't seem like Josh's style, but you never knew with my brother.) Probably they were taking turns: two of them (along with Chester) stayed in morph in the ship and kept an eye on the parallel-universe me, and the other two went off and did their own thing in the woods for two hours. Unless maybe the Yeerk in my double's head had already been starved out, and they were looking for me right now, to tell me that we were ready to go. But I hoped not, since I was looking forward to that double-solitaire game.

But even that didn't seem really important right then. Yeerks, and the Morph Force, and parallel universes, all seemed to be vague, abstract ideas that didn't have any relation to reality – that is, to the sun and the grass, and the pond that was now only a few feet away.

With a sigh of contentment, I crawled up onto the nearest log. The soft, moist wood collapsed into little claw-holds wherever I set my forefeet down; I wasn't quite sure I liked the feeling, but it was nice that the log was being so agreeable.

When I got to the far end of the log (since that was where the sun was brightest), the other turtle who was already there raised his head and stared at me for a few seconds, then decided I wasn't anything particularly interesting and went back to basking. I couldn't blame him; after all, I was a carbon copy of a turtle he presumably saw every day, so it wasn't exactly stop-the-presses news that I was there.

As soon as that thought crossed my mind, it occurred to me to wonder where my original was. I craned my neck and looked around all the logs in the pond, but I couldn't see her; maybe she had decided to take a dip in the water.

Oh, well, it didn't really matter. I closed my eyes (well, not really, since I didn't have eyelids, but I made them go all filmy, anyway) and set about the serious business of basking.

If you've never been a reptile (and, just to take a wild guess, I'd say you probably haven't), it's probably impossible to explain what makes a good bask such a glorious experience. Imagine if a Communion chalice or something could actually feel wine being poured into it: it's sort of like that, except that the wine is the warmth of the sun flowing through your body. There's nothing else quite like it in the world; if Darwin had ever felt it, he would never have been so stupid as to suggest that being warm-blooded is somehow better than being cold-blooded.

I don't know how long I spent just lying there, luxuriating in that sublime contentment. All I know is that, after a while, I started to notice a weird vibration coming from somewhere near my beak. I opened my eyes (or un-filmed them, or whatever), and saw a big, obnoxious mayfly buzzing around in front of me.

My first impulse was to ignore it. The poor thing would be dead in twenty-four hours; let it have its fun while it could. But then, after a second or two, another thought occurred to me. I hadn't had much to eat at lunch (basically, I'd just slapped a peanut-butter sandwich together and eaten it in the car), and it was still a long time till dinner – and that was an awfully nice-looking mayfly...

Quickly, before the bug had time to react, I shot my neck out and grabbed it in my jaws. It squirmed wildly in my mouth for a second or two (just like the Gedd at the refinery had done a week before), but soon enough I managed to crush its head with my beak, and then it was just a matter of forcing the motionless lump down my throat.

It wasn't until I'd swallowed it that I realized what I'd just done.

«Ack!» I shouted in open thought-speak, which fortunately wasn't overheard by anyone (that I know of) except the other turtles. My companion on the log lifted his head and stared at me censoriously, but I ignored him. I had more important things to panic about than the disapproval of turtles.

What bothered me wasn't so much the fact that I'd deliberately chosen to eat a bug. I'd done things like that before, when a new morph's instincts had been too strong for my powers of resistance. What bothered me was that, in this case, I hadn't even tried to resist the turtle's instincts. There hadn't been a single moment at which I said to myself, _Okay, Elly, get ready, this is a morph you've never done before, you're going to have to fight to retain your own emotions._ Instead, I'd just rolled over and let the turtle's mind take over mine without a fight – and I had to swallow a raw mayfly before I'd even realized it.

That almost scared me. I'd been a member of the Morph Force for over a year now; I'd morphed dozens of different animals; I'd wrestled with some of the most powerful appetites and fear reflexes on Earth, and I'd never had any of them take control of me as thoroughly as this one box turtle's sleepy placidity had done. For a moment, I worried that there was something seriously wrong with me.

The next moment, though, that worry was swallowed up by a bigger one. Turtles don't have a great sense of time, and I had no idea how long I had been sitting on that log. For all I knew, I'd already been there for an hour, and Mom and Dad and Josh, after wondering where I'd gotten to and searching the botanical gardens for me, had called the Missing Persons Bureau and reported that I'd been kidnapped – which was true, of course, although it had really happened the previous evening.

That wasn't my worry, though. My worry was that I had been there for _two_ hours.

Frantically, I looked around for some place where I could demorph. The dogwood grove was too far away; if I wasn't trapped already, I might easily get that way in the time it would take a box turtle to walk that distance. And, apart from that, there was no sheltered place anywhere near the pond...

_Oh,_ I thought to myself, staring down into the murky, plankton-filled water. _The pond. Right._

I took a deep breath and slid off the log. The pond was fairly deep at its southern end – deep enough for a girl my size to hide in, anyway. Now if only my body still remembered how to be that girl...

I focused on the demorph and breathed a silent prayer. For one terrifying moment, nothing happened; then a skein of shoulder-length hair sprang from the top of my head, and I nearly laughed with relief.

In a minute or so, I was fully human again; then I remorphed the turtle, swam to the edge of the pond, and lay in the sun a few minutes to dry off. Of course, the turtle's mind wanted to spend more than a few minutes, but I wasn't about to fall for that a second time; as soon as my shell felt reasonably dry, I forced myself back onto my feet and crawled over to the dogwood grove. The turtle's instincts weren't really that hard to ignore, when I put my mind to it – which made me wonder why they had seemed so overpowering a few minutes before.

Still, there were more important things to worry about. I crawled into position behind the tree, demorphed for the second time, and pulled my clothes on; then I raced down the path toward Ross's Willow, hoping to catch up with the others.

* * *

"Oh, there you are," said Mom when I finally did, about half a mile later. "We were just starting to wonder about you."

"Sorry," I panted. "I guess I kind of... lost track of time."

Mom smiled. "I figured as much," she said. "Your father was speculating that you might have been abducted, but I told him not to be silly. This town's criminals might be stupid, but they're not stupid enough to abduct the judge's daughter – or, for that matter, to abduct anybody in a virtually empty public accommodation where they'd be essentially the only possible suspect."

She sounded almost like Josh assessing the risks of a frontal assault on the Yeerk pool – which wasn't surprising, really, since I've always known that Josh got his military smarts from Mom's side of the family. (On Grandpa's side, Mom can trace her lineage back to a colonel who commanded our state's 5th Regiment during the Civil War.)

"No, nothing like that," I said. "I was just poking around the turtle pond. I barely even moved until about ten minutes ago."

"Mm," said Mom. "Well, it's probably time to get moving now. Your father's planning on preparing Lamb Predictable tonight, and you know how long that usually takes him. If we don't wrap up here soon, we probably won't eat dinner until about nine o'clock."

"That's fine," I said. "I think I've seen everything I want to see, anyway."

"Okay, then," said Dad, rising from his seat under the ginkgo trees. "Let's get this show on the road."

"Though I'm not sure I'd have minded eating at nine," I added as we headed for the car. "It's just a hunch, but I don't think I'll be very hungry for a while yet."


	23. Evening

Of course, Daddy proved me wrong. I could eat every bug in America, and I'd still have an appetite for Lamb Predictable.

Since Lamb Predictable isn't listed in _The Joy of Cooking_ (yet), you're probably wondering what it is – and where it gets its name. The first question's easier: it's a kind of funky mixture of lamb, potatoes, garlic, and a bunch of other things I can't even guess at, all slathered over with Daddy's special milk gravy. Glorious stuff.

The story behind the name is a little more complicated. One evening about three years ago, Daddy was fooling around in the kitchen with a leftover hunk of lamb (he does most of the cooking in our house, since he works at home and Mom has her crazy judge's schedule), and he came up with the concoction I just described, calling it Lamb Surprise. Josh and I both fell in love with it instantly, and from then on, whenever we had an extra chunk of lamb in the refrigerator, we would pressure him to make it again. After a few months of this, Daddy observed that it was ridiculous to call something Lamb Surprise when it's become one of your trademark dishes, and so he officially changed its name to Lamb Predictable. We all agreed that that sounded better, and Lamb Predictable it's been ever since.

That evening's batch was right up there with the best of them: a thick, luscious mass of meat, potatoes, and milk fat – the sort of meal that people in certain other parts of the country would get heart attacks just looking at. I had my usual miniscule portions, of course (I don't think I've ever voluntarily eaten more than half a pound of food at a sitting in my life), but I had two of them, and I enjoyed every bite.

Then came the double-solitaire game with Josh. We played two rounds, and I creamed him both times; we were just shuffling our decks for a third go-round when Mom commented, "Actually, Elly, you should probably be getting ready for bed. You and Andrea are serving tomorrow, if you'll recall."

"We are?" I said, startled. What with one thing and another, I had completely lost track of which Sundays I was down for altar-server duty.

"Yes, you are," said Mom. "Which is why, much as it will no doubt disappoint Josh to let you retire undefeated, I am forced to put the kibosh on your plans for a third game and tell you to get moving on your nighttime hygiene tasks. We don't want any bleary-eyed acolytes at St. Jude's, now do we?"

"No, I suppose not," I admitted. "Sorry, Josh."

Josh shrugged. "Probably just as well," he said. "Better to be 0-for-2 than 0-for-3, right?"

I grinned, gave him a hug, and got up and headed for the bathroom.

* * *

I was halfway through brushing my teeth when I saw the stinkbug on the wall beside me – a big, grayish one, no different from a thousand others that infest our house around this time of year. It wasn't hurting anything, just sitting on the wall above the bathtub, but my experiment with the turtle morph that afternoon had soured me on insects generally, and I wrinkled my nose and moved to flick it into the bathtub.

«Please do not do that,» said a familiar voice.

I froze, swallowed my toothpaste, and whispered, "Anifal?"

Anifal laughed inside my head. «I had feared you might recognize my insect morph,» he said. «It had not occurred to me to fear that I might have to reveal myself to you to prevent you from doing me bodily injury. Prince Josh's descriptions of your gentleness toward sub-sentient creatures seem to have been somewhat exaggerated.»

Personally, I wouldn't have said that flicking a stinkbug into a bathtub constituted bodily injury, but I was too flustered to argue the point. "Anifal, what... what are you doing here?" I said.

«Watching over you,» Anifal replied. «As I told you last night, there is a chance that this mission will place you in considerable danger. It seemed advisable, both to me and to Prince Josh, that you should have a guard of some kind who could step in at a moment of sudden crisis – and, since I am the only member of the Morph Force who can demorph directly to a battle-ready form, I volunteered myself for the task.»

"Wait a second," I said. "You mean... you mean that you've spent the entire day following me around in stinkbug morph?"

«Not precisely,» said Anifal. «There have, of course, been periods when I had to retreat to some secluded location and demorph – and, for that matter, when you were visiting the botanical gardens, I found the stinkbug morph unduly cumbersome, and switched to a more mobile insect form that I found handily acquirable. A very pleasing insect form, I might add: it almost made me feel that I was back on the homeworld again.»

"Why was that?" I asked, though I had a sinking feeling that I already knew the answer.

«It had no mouth.»

I couldn't decide which was worse: that he had been watching me while I ate the mayfly, or that he had been doing it in mayfly morph.

"Right, okay," I said. "Listen, about what happened at the botanical gardens... you won't tell Josh, will you?"

«I am under no obligation to do so,» said Anifal. «If you wish, I will not. But–» and here his voice suddenly turned stern – «it would be gratifying to know that I will not have to keep such a secret more than once.»

"You won't," I promised. "Scout's honor."

Anifal cocked his stinkbug head. «A curious expression,» he said. «Do scouts have an unusual amount of honor on your world?»

"Well, that's what they tell me," I said. "I never was one, myself – although I did once help my cousin Becky sell cookies for her troop."

«Ah,» said Anifal, exactly as though he knew what I was talking about. «Well, in that case, I suppose there is nothing more to be said. Finish your lavations, and I will await you in your bedroom.»

"My bedroom?" I repeated, startled.

«Certainly,» said Anifal. «You did not suppose, did you, that my task was ended when you fell asleep? I would be a poor guardian indeed if I forsook you precisely when you were most vulnerable.»

"But, then, when are _you_ going to sleep?" I said.

Anifal waved a dismissive foreleg. «Andalites need less sleep than humans do,» he said. «And, in any case, you will not need a guardian much longer. There seems reason to believe that your duplicate's Controller has not fed since last Thursday afternoon, so her final hours will come before tomorrow's sun has set. I fancy I can hold out that long.»

I sighed. "Anifal," I said, "it was nice of you to be concerned about me, and I don't want to seem ungrateful, but I really think you should go back to the clearing and let me handle this on my own."

«I scarcely think that would be advisable, Elly,» said Anifal. «You have already taken one serious risk, from which it was purely fortuitous that you emerged unscathed...»

"I already told you that's not going to happen again," I said, nettled.

«I do not doubt you,» said Anifal. «I merely mention the incident as an example of how delicate your position is. However well you may conceal it – and you have done very well so far – you do not truly belong in this place, and at any moment you may inadvertently betray that fact. A word, a look...»

"Anifal, I'm a Morph Forcer," I said. "I've had plenty of practice at keeping secrets."

«Of course,» said Anifal, «but you do not, in this case, know what secrets you need to keep. You do not know all the ways in which this universe differs from ours, nor how the recent history of your own life has been altered by the presence of a Yeerk in your counterpart's head. A situation may arise in which such knowledge becomes critical, and then...»

"I can improvise," I said. "I've had practice at that, too. Please, Anifal – I need to make this decision alone."

It's hard to read expressions in a stinkbug's face, but I'm pretty sure Anifal was surprised at that. «Decision?» he repeated. «There is no decision facing you. You will maintain the pretense of being your counterpart in this universe until the Yeerk is starved out of her head; then you will return to the clearing, morph the Ssstram ship, and take us back to our home universe. What scope is there for personal discretion in that?»

I wasn't really sure myself. All throughout that day, I had had the idea that there was some important decision I would have to make before the mission was over, but I hadn't really analyzed it – and, at the moment, I wasn't sure I wanted to. I felt, somehow, that it was a dangerous idea: that, if I followed up the thought that was rattling around in the back of my head, I would end up killing Josh, or betraying Earth to the Yeerks, or doing something equally desperate and wrong. It wasn't something I was eager to think about – and talking about it to Anifal, who always seemed to have such clear ideas of what he was and wasn't supposed to do, would only have made it worse.

Still, now that I'd blurted it out, I had to say something to him. I thought about one answer, rejected it, thought about another one, rejected that too, thought about three or four more, and finally just said, "Please, Anifal?"

Anifal stared at me (or, anyway, waved his antennae at me) for about fifteen seconds without saying anything. Then, just as I was getting ready to break down and tell him the whole story, he sighed and said, «Very well.»

He spread his wings, buzzed down to the floor, and crawled slowly through the crack under the bathroom door. I turned back to the sink, put another glob of Aquafresh on my toothbrush, and started viciously attacking my molars again, trying to ignore the stinging heat in my eyes and the tears I could see welling up behind my reflection's glasses.


	24. Andrea

"So, girls," said Father Honeycutt to Andrea and me, "have you worked out who gets the processional cross this time?"

We nodded wearily. "It's my turn," I said.

"All right, just checking," said Father. "I know you two sometimes have a problem with that, so..."

"Once, Father," said Andrea. "That was one time."

"Yes, well, when it happens to be the time the bishop's concelebrating, you don't forget it very easily," said Father.

"No, we don't," I said. "Which is why it's never going to happen again. Scout's honor." (As I said it, I couldn't help thinking about the last time I had used that phrase, and I felt a sudden urge to check the vestibule for stinkbugs in case Josh had overridden my request to Anifal. I squelched it, though; acting suspicious in the presence of Father Honeycutt and Andrea was exactly the sort of thing Anifal had warned me against – and, anyway, after the last two times, I was getting sick of doing things on impulse.)

"Well, that's good to know," said Father. "All right, then, what else... Elly, you remember what I said about using a decent amount of water for the ablution?"

I nodded.

"Good," said Father. "And, if a visitor from Immaculate Heart harasses you after Mass about being altar girls, you will say...?"

"The gender roles in the Catholic liturgy are based on the iconography of Christ's mystical marriage to the Church," we chorused. "Furthermore, the role of the altar server is not that of an _alter Christus_, but may more accurately be described as an _alter Ecclesia_, inasmuch as the altar servers represent the Church Triumphant around the throne of the Lamb. Given this, it would appear to actually be more desirable that altar servers be female, and certainly ought not to be a cause of scandal among the faithful."

"Bravé." Father Honeycutt checked his watch. "I suppose I should go count the hosts now," he said. "Back in two shakes of a lamb's tail."

He strode out of the vestibule, shutting the door behind him, and something indefinable changed in Andrea's face; she seemed to relax somehow, the way Abby does when she exits the stage during one of her school plays and shifts back to her own personality. "Beams of Kandrona, I thought the old fool would never leave," she said, and turned to me. "So, Ninno, what happened to you yesterday?"

It caught me completely off guard. Stupid, of course, but I can be like that sometimes. I knew that Andrea was a Controller; I knew that, in this universe, I was one too; and yet, somehow, I had never managed to make the connection and realize that Andrea's Yeerk knew mine. Of course, as soon as we were alone together, she would drop the pretense of being human.

Probably the alternate me had been captured in the first place thanks to her. I couldn't count the number of times that my own Andrea had nagged me to join the Sharing; if I hadn't known better (which, of course, in this universe, I hadn't), I would have been enslaved ages ago.

It took me about two seconds to realize all this – but Andrea's Yeerk wanted an answer in one. To stall for time, I said, brilliantly, "Huh?"

"What happened to you?" Andrea repeated. "You told me on Friday that you'd call me the next day and give me the rhyme to put in the new Sharing brochure. I spent practically all of Saturday glued to the phone, and you never called."

"Oh, that." _So that's why the Yeerk me was reading_ Now We Are Six_, _I thought. _For inspiration. I wondered._ "Sorry about that. I just, you know, couldn't think of anything that would impress the Sub-Visser." (I carefully refrained from mentioning Dr. Daught's number, since I had no way of knowing if he had been promoted higher than Three Hundred and Sixty-Seven in this universe.)

"What do you mean, you couldn't think of anything?" said Andrea. "All we need is four rhyming lines about the Sharing that can get stuck in a human's head. What's so hard about that?"

"It's not that simple, Sarem," I said, trying to sound like Abby talking about the travails of the amateur actress (and feeling grateful that I knew Andrea's Controller's name from one of the times we'd infiltrated the Yeerk pool). "You can't just turn on creativity like a faucet. If there's not that extra spark of something _real_ about it, something that just happens naturally instead of you forcing it into place, the rhyme's not going to stick in anybody's mind."

Andrea rolled her eyes. "You sound like a human," she said.

"I do not!"

The words came out without me thinking about them: pure survival instinct, I guess. It was only after I'd said them that I realized what a stupid thing it was to do. A real Yeerk wouldn't be terrified that another Yeerk might think she was a human; if _I_ was terrified, obviously it meant I had something to be terrified about. I swallowed quietly, and waited for Andrea to catch on.

Instead of which, she took a step backward and held up her hands nervously. "Relax, Ninno," she said. "I wasn't accusing you of host sympathy or anything. I just meant, you know, this business of 'waiting for inspiration' instead of just doing a job when it's given to you... it's not quite the spirit that built the Empire, is it?"

Host sympathy? I'd never heard that one before. I supposed it was like a British officer "going native" and joining the Zulus – except that, judging from Andrea's reaction, the Yeerks were a little sterner about it than Queen Victoria was. Maybe regular Yeerks _were_ paranoid about people thinking they were getting too human.

I took a deep breath, partly out of relief and partly just to get some oxygen back in my brain. "No," I said. "I guess it isn't. Sorry."

"Oh, no problem," said Andrea quickly. "I just wish you'd told me yesterday that's what you were going to do. Andrea's dad was breathing fire by the end of the afternoon; apparently there was an issue with his column that he wanted to get approval about from his editor, and he wasn't exactly pleased that I kept saying, 'No, Dad, we have to keep the line free, Elly's supposed to call.'" She sighed. "Why he doesn't just get call-waiting, I have no idea."

I'm not sure what it was about that last comment that made me suddenly see her – the Yeerk, I mean – as a person. That's one of the problems with fighting a war: you get so used to thinking about the other side as "the enemy" that you forget that they have souls, too (which is easy to forget, anyway, when you're dealing with brain-controlling super-slugs). Of course, we always drew a distinction between the leaders of the Yeerk invasion, like Visser Seven, and the regular "civilian" Yeerks – after all, we didn't want to turn into Sherman burning down Atlanta or something – but I'm not sure I'd ever realized, before then, just who those "civilian" Yeerks were. You don't think of alien invaders, somehow, as having real lives: as being friends with each other, and working on assignments, and getting annoyed by little inconveniences like not having call-waiting. But, suddenly, it dawned on me that, yeah, of course they did – and that, from their perspective, _I_, as an "Andalite bandit", was the hostile creature from outer space. It wasn't much of an epiphany – if I had been really intelligent, it would have occurred to me eons before – but, coming when and how it did, it hit me like a ton of bricks, and I felt myself stupidly (and dangerously) getting ready to cry.

"Ninno?" said Andrea, noticing the weird look on my face. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," I managed to say. "Nothing, it's just..." I couldn't think of anything else to say, and I didn't trust my voice much further anyway, so I just finished with another, "Nothing."

Andrea stepped forward, looking concerned. "Ninno," she said softly, "it's me. Sarem Eight-Nine-Nought. We've known each other almost a local year, and I knew your host I don't know how long before that. You can trust me, okay?"

And that just made things ten times worse. Ever since I learned that Andrea was a Controller, I'd been thinking of her Yeerk as this evil creature who'd enslaved my best friend – but now, when she said that thing about how long she'd known me, I realized that that was wrong. If she was infested when she was four, and I didn't meet her until we were both in second grade, then... then her Yeerk _was_ my best friend.

_Oh, sweet Jesus,_ I thought, _why did You have to make my life so complicated?_

I knew I would burst out in tears if I thought about all this a second longer, so I forced my mind onto a different subject. Poems, that was it. She wanted a poem for the Sharing – a _Now-We-Are-Six_ kind of poem.

I remembered the last verse of "Binker", and played with it in my mind to see if I couldn't make a Sharing thing out of it. A lifetime spent playing word games with Josh came to my aid, and in about twenty seconds I had put together something that didn't stink too badly.

"Okay, how about this?" I said. "'Well, I really like the Boy Scouts, but they make you sleep in tents, / And I like to play arcade games, but they cost you fifty cents, / And I like to be at arts fairs till they've finished with their songs, / But the Sharing's free, and comfy, and it lasts your whole life long.'"

Andrea thought about it for a minute. She didn't look particularly impressed, but at least she didn't seem to recognize it (which didn't surprise me, since her parents aren't schmaltzy types like my dad, so they wouldn't have read _Now We Are Six _to her enough times for her to have it basically memorized). "Might work, sure," she said. "Call up the Sub-Visser this afternoon, and run it by him."

"Okay," I said.

"And Ninno?" Andrea added, touching me on the arm. "Get some extra _dulot_ tonight, all right?"

I later found out, from Chester, that _dulot_ is what Yeerks do instead of sleeping. At the time, though, I had no idea what she was talking about – and I couldn't exactly ask her, so I just nodded and promised I would.

At this point, Father Honeycutt came back into the vestibule. "Sorry I took so long, girls," he said. "You about ready to go?"

Andrea glanced at me, and, when I nodded slightly, said, "Yeah, I think so."

"All right, then," said Father. "Elly, take the cross; Andrea, take the book to give to our beloved lector, Mr. Walbert; and let's get this show on the road."


	25. Homily

Despite what Father Honeycutt said, Mr. Walbert is not, in fact, one of our more beloved lectors – at least, not by me. I'm sure his wife always tells him after Mass what a wonderful job he did, but personally I've always been amazed by how dull he can make the Old Testament sound. He'll read some passage from Isaiah about the king being restored in splendor and wolves and sheep making up and becoming friends again, and it'll sound like the annual financial report at Johnson & Johnson or something.

That, combined with my pre-Mass revelation and the fact that Andrea was in charge of the lectionary, meant that I paid hardly any attention to the service until Father got up for the gospel reading and homily. We were in Year C, so he read something out of Luke (I forget what, though I think it had something to do with beating handmaidens), but he didn't preach on it. Instead, he turned back to the epistle. (That's pretty typical for Father Honeycutt. He always says that we have three readings for a reason, and he doesn't think much of priests who focus on the Gospel to the exclusion of the rest of the Bible. He's even written homilies around responsorial psalms once or twice.)

"You all heard today's epistle when Daniel read it just now," he said. "But I'd like to read part of it again, all the same – in the original Douay translation, if you don't mind, since Hebrews 11 isn't one of the NAB's proudest moments."

We all chuckled, and a couple of the older people in the front rows nodded and made go-ahead gestures. So Father reached under his chasuble, pulled out his loyal pocket New Testament (it was an ordination present from his mother, he says, and he never goes anywhere without it), and flipped through it until he found the passage.

"'By faith he that is called Abraham obeyed,'" he read aloud, "'to go out into a place which he was to receive for an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he abode in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in cottages with Isaac and Jacob, the co-heirs of the same promise. For he looked for a city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.'"

He closed the book again, slipped it back into his cassock, and stared out over the congregation. "I don't know about you good people, but Abraham always rather intimidated me," he said. "Here's a man who lives in one of the great cities of Mesopotamia, whose family clearly has some money and prestige associated with it, and one day God appears to him and says, 'Get up and leave everything,' and he does it. Meanwhile, I consider myself to be doing well if the Bishop sends me to St. Agnes's to cover for Father Kennedy on short notice and I don't use more than three swear words."

Personally, I don't believe Father Honeycutt's ever sworn in his life, but it made a nice little bit of humor.

"But I suppose that's why God didn't pick me to be the father of the Chosen People," he continued. "You need someone special for that role – someone whose faith can serve as a model for all the generations after him. And, whatever his other faults, Abraham had that. Leaving the comforts of Ur to wander in the wilderness; being willing to sacrifice Isaac; not turning in his résumé when God introduced the idea of circumcision – oh, definitely Abraham had faith." (More laughter.)

"But where do you get that kind of faith? That's the question that matters to those of us who aspire to be saints – to rest, as Christ put it, in Abraham's bosom. And that's the question St. Paul answers for us today. 'For he looked for a city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.' And, a little later on, talking about those who followed in Abraham's footsteps, he describes them as 'confessing that they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth; for they that say these things do signify that they seek a country'.

"You see the point? If you think you've found your city, or your country – your home, in other words – then you don't have any need for faith. That was the substance of the devil's charge against Job: his faith wasn't real, because it was based on contentment with the things of this world. It wasn't until those words had been forced out of his mouth – 'Although He should kill me, I will trust in Him' – that he could definitely be called a man of faith.

"Now, to those of us who have achieved a bit of comfort in this life, that sounds rather unfair. Why should you have to lose everything in order to be counted among the faithful? But what we tend to forget is that, eventually, all of us _will_ lose everything. A day is coming for each of us, sooner or later – sooner, probably, in my case; hopefully later, in most of yours – when everything that we've accumulated will slip from our fingers, and only one thing in the universe will matter: Did we love God? Did we trust Him? Did we do what He asked of us, painful or arduous though it might be? Or did we let all that slide in a hopeless attempt to find happiness and contentment that we knew we couldn't keep?" (Probably it was just my imagination, but I could have sworn his eyes flickered to me as he said that last bit.)

"Which brings us back to St. Paul, and his city with foundations. Generally speaking, the foundations of this world's cities are things like rivers, or trade routes, or oases – the things that bring material prosperity to large numbers of people. And that's all very well, so long as you remember that _it's not going to last_. Oases dry up; trades routes shift over time; and even the largest river can be diverted or lose its source. And then what becomes of your great city? Look to the ruins of Nineveh for your answer.

"No, if you want a city that truly has foundations – a city that no drought can wither, and no earthquake can shatter – a city that will last as long as your soul is going to – then none of this world's cities are going to satisfy you. You have to turn your eyes elsewhere; you have to look, as the Apostle says, for a city 'whose builder and maker is God'.

"We all know what that city is. In one sense, as baptized members of the Church, we live in it already; in another sense, we're still waiting to catch a glimpse of it. It's a city of saints and heroes, of jasper and gold, built on the apostles and guarded by the patriarchs; it's a city that no one can reach except the ones who overcome – who persevere to the end in the will of the Father.

"It's not an easy thing to find. The road to it might lead you through poverty, suffering, loneliness, or any other kind of misfortune short of actual sin. Or, of course, it might not: on occasion, the search for the Eternal City has brought people long life, prosperity, and international influence. There's no way to say for certain until you've actually made it.

"But, whatever happens, know this much: when you're on that quest – as I hope everyone here will be when he or she walks out of this building today – what's important is the end. And when you reach that end, you'll see that everything you went through to get there doesn't matter a jot next to the end itself. The white stone, the morning star, the throne of Christ: that's what we're meant for, and everything else is just so much noise. So, whatever your situation in life might be right now, have faith, and remember that the goal is still ahead."

And he folded up his homily text, came down from the pulpit, and sat down in his chair behind the altar.

* * *

It wasn't one of his great homilies, maybe (not like the one he preached at my confirmation, where it was like Isaiah himself was speaking through his mouth), but it got under my skin for some reason. I wasn't sure why. After all, I knew all that about this world not being permanent, right? I knew that you could only find true happiness in heaven, and that faith meant not minding if your life on Earth was rotten; it was one of Father's favorite themes. So why was it bugging me so much that he had picked this Sunday to say it?

It was probably only about two minutes that I brooded on that, but it seemed like half an hour, at least. Eventually, though, Father took pity on me, and stood up and got the liturgy moving again. "Now let us rise and join together in our profession of faith…"


	26. Fugue

Later that afternoon, I was sitting on my bed stroking Lapkin and trying to sort through all the different thoughts that were nagging at me. Double-solitaire games, turtle instincts, unidentified decisions, Andrea, Sarem, and Abraham all whirled around in my head, refusing to fit together. It was like looking at a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces had nothing but bumps on them.

I tried to figure out when this whole thing had started. Was it just a side effect of crossing between the two universes? No, because I hadn't felt any sense of an impending decision on Apollo. In fact, I couldn't remember having any inkling of this feeling until I'd woken up on Saturday morning. Had something happened while I was asleep?

_Maybe you've been infected by a hostile memetic parasite,_ I thought to myself, only half-joking. _I'm sure Richard could give you all kinds of precedents for…_

But I never finished the thought. A sudden, searing jolt of pain shot through my body, and every other thought was blasted from my brain.

It only lasted for a moment, and then it was gone. Gone as though it had never happened. But, in that moment, I must have let out some kind of scream, because Lapkin looked up at me in that quick, attentive way cats do when you startle them, and Josh called from his bedroom: "Elly, what was that?"

"Nothing," I called back. "Just… just a bug. It startled me for a second. I'm fine." But my voice was shaking, because now I was scared.

The next jolt of pain came about five seconds later. It might have actually been a little worse than the first one, but I was expecting it this time, and I managed to keep myself from screaming. Just barely, though. I'm not a sissy when it comes to pain (I used to be, but that was before the Morph Force), but this was different from anything I'd ever felt. Imagine if every cell in your body simultaneously caught fire, and you'll have some idea of what it was like.

I clung tighter to Lapkin; he mewed in protest, but I barely noticed. What was the matter with me? Was there some sort of virus in my brain, that had first messed up my ability to think straight and was now playing havoc with my pain sensors? Was I having some kind of allergy to the matter in this universe? Was I – then came another burst of pain, and suddenly the reasons didn't seem so important anymore.

It went on like this for almost half an hour. At several points, I almost broke down and called to the parallel Josh to call a doctor, or come and hold my hand, or _something_ – but I didn't dare risk it. In the state I was in, I couldn't trust myself not to let him know who I really was – and there are worse things than having every cell in your body set on fire, and falling into Visser Three's clutches was about five of them. (Not that I thought the parallel Josh was a Controller, after his comments about the Sharing the other day, but, in the Morph Force, paranoia is a survival skill.)

I can't remember when I caught on to what was happening. It was obvious in retrospect, but forming logical thoughts isn't easy under those kinds of circumstances – and, even in retrospect, I wasn't quite sure _why_ it was happening. I mean, I hadn't been feeling anything else that the other me felt, and hosts don't usually feel their Controllers' starvation pains, anyway. But so many weird things had been happening lately that there didn't seem to be much point in questioning this one – not that I was in much of a state to ask questions, anyway.

So there I was, lying on my bed with my cat curled up next to me, and sharing in the agony of a Yeerk that was dying inside another me's skull about a mile away. I suppose I'm the only person that's ever happened to.

Lucky me.

* * *

After about half an hour, the memories started. I'd been expecting this; Yeerks lose telepathic control during their deaths the way we lose muscle control, and they start pouring their own memories, along with those of their old hosts, into whatever brain they happen to be attached to at the moment. It was kind of a relief, actually; some of the memories were so vivid that they left no room in my brain for the starvation pangs, and I went from feeling like one of the locust victims in Revelation 9 to drifting dreamily through a series of half-remembered scenes, some touching, some scary, some just plain weird.

For instance, there was the one where I saw how Taxxons reproduce. Apparently, my double's Controller had infested a Taxxon at some point in her life, and she (actually, she was a _he_ at that point) had been assigned to help create some new Taxxon hosts. That was one of the scary memories.

But there were some good memories, too. In fact, there were a bunch of good memories – lots more than I would have expected, considering the source. There were memories of her early youth, of swimming around soaking up Kandrona and not being afraid; there were memories of infesting her first Gedd, when she got to see the world through real eyes for the first time; there were memories of riding something called a _limner_ across the grasslands of some neutral race's main continent, and feeling genuinely happy for the first time since her promotion to human-Controller status. (Funny, how all Yeerks seem to want the chance to infest humans, and then, when they get it, they go around terrified of what high-profile targets they've suddenly become. There's a moral there, I guess.)

And then there were the memories that I just couldn't make head or tail of. There was the one where her Taxxon host was licking a path along the floor of his burrow so another Taxxon could walk on it; I couldn't figure that one out at all. And there was the one showing the Yeerk's pride when she finally succeeded in "breaking" my double; I knew how I _ought_ to feel about that, but, seeing it from the Yeerk's point of view, I could barely help being impressed. (I'd never realized how willful I could have been, under the right circumstances.)

I didn't see many memories from her Gedd host. The ones I did see were kind of sad, after my own experiences as a Gedd; I remembered loping along the surface of Apollo, with the rain tingling against my skin and the smell of vegetation in my nostrils, and I felt sorry for the old, tired animal that had never seen anything but the inside of a Yeerk farming combine. I suppose Richard feels the same way when he watches documentaries about industrial cattle farms.

And I didn't see any of my double's memories. That was natural, of course, since it was my double's brain that she was using, but it disappointed me just a little. I had kind of wanted to know what had happened to me between the day I didn't meet Elfangor and the day Ninno took me over. Still, that's life, sometimes.

* * *

It was in the middle of an early-youth memory that the end came. I was clicking out a message to one of my spawn-mates, talking about all the great things I would do once I had a host, when suddenly the whole world seemed to go faint and misty, and a series of random, irrational images swam past me almost faster than I could register them.

I saw Visser One holding a baby that had the face of the late Visser Three, and looking down in alarm as it squirmed and wailed in thought-speak.

I saw Josh and me playing last night's double-solitaire game, except that Josh was beating the pants off me because every card in both our decks was the eight of diamonds.

I saw two aliens I'd never seen before – one that looked like a wise old hedgehog, and one that didn't seem to have any features except a giant eye – sitting next to each other on thrones in an ancient stone hall, and discussing how you play chess with a fifth knight that doesn't belong to either side.

I saw the four of us watching _Cleopatra_ as a family, and Octavian shouting from the screen, "Ninno is dead! Ninno Five-Six-Three of the Klaath Niar pool lives no more!"

I saw stars…

I saw turtles…

I saw green…

I saw yellow…

Then my brain simply turned out the lights, and for a while I saw nothing at all – not even blackness.

* * *

When I came to, a few minutes later, the world looked fuzzier than I remembered. It took me a second to realize that I had knocked my glasses off; I groped on the floor, found something that felt like them, and slipped them on.

My bedroom was just the way I remembered it. Lapkin had moved up to the head of my bed, and was looking down at me with concern, but nothing else had changed. Yet, somehow, everything was different.

"It's over," I whispered.

And it was.


	27. Conflict

I fell back on my bed with a sigh, closed my eyes again, and didn't move for a long time. It was silly, but it seemed dangerous to move – as though I might trigger the starvation pangs again if I twitched or rolled over. I felt Lapkin nuzzling at my head, and it made me want to giggle, but I still didn't move.

I'm not really sure what after that. I know I was there for about half an hour, but I must have drifted off to sleep at some point, because the next thing I remember is Anifal's voice in my mind, saying, «Elly, are you all right?»

I sat up, blinked a few times, and looked up at my window. A nuthatch was sitting on the sill, staring at me anxiously. (At least, I'm pretty sure it was anxious. It's hard to tell body language in a songbird, but then I've had a lot of practice.)

I smiled. "Hi, Anifal," I said. "Yeah, I'm fine."

«Good,» said Anifal. «Your double's Controller is dead; her fugue ended about thirty minutes ago. Everything is ready for you to come to the clearing and acquire the Ssstram ship.»

I sighed. "Okay, thanks," I said. "Go ahead and head back. I'll be along in a few minutes."

«As you wish,» said Anifal. «Incidentally, did you experience any discomfort while the Yeerk was dying?»

I blinked. "Um… yeah, actually, I did," I said. "How did you know?"

«I didn't,» said Anifal. «But Chester wished me to ask. Apparently the Yeerk fugue has been known to have odd effects on space and time in its immediate vicinity, and he suspected that the ontological overlap between yourself and your duplicate might cause you to serve as a secondary nexus for such phenomena.»

"Oh." _You could have warned me, Chester,_ I thought. "Well, yeah, it was pretty rough for a while. But I guess I made it through okay."

«I see,» said Anifal softly. «And that is why you need a few minutes?»

I nodded. I hadn't really thought about it, but it seemed likely enough.

«Very well,» said Anifal. «Remember to tell your parents when you leave the house, so that your double doesn't provoke curiosity when she returns. Also, you may wish to take the easterly route through the woods: since the battle at the logging mill never occurred in this universe, the old hawk is still patrolling the western side.»

"Tell Daddy I'm leaving, and keep to the east," I said. "Got it."

«May strength and freedom be ever yours,» said Anifal. «Farewell.»

He turned around, spread his wings, and flew off towards the woods.

* * *

I sighed, and picked up Lapkin again. As he nuzzled into my shoulder, I thought about Anifal's goodbye. _Strength and freedom,_ I mused. _Does that mean you have to be strong to be free? Or is it the other way around?_

Oh, well, it wasn't really important now. What I had to do was get myself psyched up to go downstairs and tell Daddy I was going to take a short walk down the road. (Well, actually I was going to _ask_ if I could take a walk down the road, but, since Daddy hardly ever told me no unless it was something really important, that was almost the same thing.) Then all I had to do was walk down the road until I was out of sight of the house, scurry far enough into the woods to be covered by the trees, and morph to chickadee and fly to the clearing. Then it would be back to our own universe. Back to Visser Seven and the Morph Force – back to last-minute escapes from death, torture, or getting stuck in earthworm morph – back to parents I had to lie to every day, and a brother I wasn't sure I knew anymore. Back home.

_Stop it, Elly,_ I told myself. _It's not a question of whether you're having fun. Your planet needs you. And anyway, what else are you going to do? Just stay here and keep pretending to be your double?_

Well, no. Of course I wasn't asking to do that.

Not really, anyway.

I mean, okay, maybe I'd thought about it once or twice, but…

I bit my lip. No, it was time to start being honest with myself. I was a big girl, I could handle the truth – and the truth was that, ever since that first night in this universe, I'd been secretly wishing that I could spend the rest of my life here, in a living replica of my pre-Morph-Force life. I just hadn't let myself admit it, since I knew it wasn't the right thing to want.

But that wasn't fair. Why shouldn't I want my old life back? Wasn't it a good thing to be an ordinary girl who doesn't go out and kill people on a regular basis? Even Josh had said sometimes that he wished Elfangor had landed on someone else's back road.

But that was different, wasn't it? Josh hadn't had any choice. It was okay for him to daydream about being a civilian again, since there wasn't any risk of it leading him to abandon the Morph Force. For him, it was a fantasy; for me, it was a temptation.

Because, really, it would be amazingly easy for me to do. All I would have to do would be to not move for about an hour: that would be how long it would take Josh to realize that I wasn't following Anifal back to the clearing, and send someone else to check up on me – or, actually, he'd probably come himself. And then I'd tell him that I'd decided not to go back.

That was the only part that scared me. Not that Josh would be mad, or would force me to go back (he's always said that anyone can quit the Morph Force at any time), but somehow I couldn't imagine saying to Josh that I didn't want to be in the same universe with him anymore. Because I knew that, as hard and military as he'd gotten, he still loved me; I'd seen him take risks for me in battle that he never would have taken for Richard or Anifal, or even Abby. If he lost me – and, worse yet, if I told him that I wanted to be lost – it would kill him. And I didn't want to do that to him, because I loved him, too.

But I was pretty sure I could get through that somehow. I'd hate myself for it, but eventually it would be over. And Josh would fly away, and he'd have someone else morph the Ssstram ship, and he'd take the duplicate Elly back to fill my place. And I'd be left alone in a parallel universe.

Only I wouldn't really be alone. Sure, I'd still have to keep my morphing power a secret, and I'd have to find some way to deal with Andrea/Sarem and the Sharing, but the real barrier between me and everyone else I knew would be gone. I wouldn't have to tell Daddy I was going to Abby's house when I was really going to the Moon in a stolen Bug fighter. I could go back to chatting Father Honeycutt's ear off in the confessional, instead of having to carefully equivocate my way through each sentence. I'd be _free_.

_«May strength and freedom be ever yours.»_

But I'm not strong, Anifal. I've always known that. I'm the girl who's still afraid to go to the beach because I was stung once by a jellyfish. I'm the Morph Force's resident crybaby. I'm…

_«You are one of the galaxy's greatest warriors.»_

When had Anifal said that? Oh, right, on Apollo – the same place he had told us the story about Elfangor living on Earth. _«He swore that he had been a fool and a coward – that no sentient being could rest while the Yeerks remained at large.»_

But that's just not fair. I don't want to be a great warrior; I just want to go to bed at night and know that the world will still be there in the morning. What's wrong with that?

_"Look to the ruins of Nineveh, Elly. You can't find the city with foundations unless you persevere to the end."_

I groaned, and buried my face in Lapkin's fur. "Oh, Lapkin baby," I said, "what am I supposed to do?"

I hadn't expected an answer; it was just one of those things you say to cats when you can't talk to people. So you can imagine how I felt when I heard a voice in my head – not a thought-speak voice, just a voice. **I think you know what you ought to do, young wanderer Eldora.**

I froze for about half a minute; then, very slowly, I picked up Lapkin and held him in front of me. Outwardly, he looked like the same cat he'd always been, but his eyes were different: wiser, somehow. And slightly amused, as well.

"Lapkin?" I whispered.

The cat lips smiled. **No, not Lapkin, **said the voice. **My true name would mean nothing to you. You may call me simply "Ellimist".**


	28. Wild Card

For once in my life, I asked the sensible question. "What's an Ellimist?"

**I am a member of the most ancient race in the galaxy, **said the voice, as the thing that looked like Lapkin climbed off my lap and sat down on the blanket beside me. **At one time, many millions of years ago, we were as you are: we dwelt on a planetary surface, and had bodies of gross matter. But then a great crisis arose, one that threatened our very existence as a species, and our only hope of survival lay in transcending our material forms and becoming beings of a higher plane. This we did, and now we neither breed nor die, but spend our existence in the joyous contemplation of the cosmos and all its creatures.**

"Uh-huh," I said. Something in the tone of the voice made me think that wasn't the whole story, but I wasn't really interested in probing further. "So what are you doing here? And what have you done with my cat?"

The Ellimist looked amused. **To answer the latter question first, I have done nothing with _your_ cat, **it said. **Your counterpart's cat, I have abstracted to a state of being that has no parallel in your experience. Suffice it to say that he is in no danger, and that, when I have departed from this dimensional plane, he will be returned instantaneously to your side.**

I barely heard the last sentence. As soon as the Ellimist had said the words "your counterpart", my blood had run cold; I hadn't realized, until just then, that a being of a higher plane might be able to tell that I wasn't from his universe.

**As to what I am doing here, **the Ellimist continued, **that requires some further explanation. You must understand, first, that we Ellimists are not alone in the realms beyond the senses; there are other, less benign creatures who share our mode of existence, and much of our strength is spent trying to protect the lesser beings of the universe from them.**

I wanted to ask who he was calling a lesser being, but I kept quiet. If I was millions of years old and could twist the space-time continuum like a wet dishcloth, I'd probably act a little high-and-mighty myself.

**Most of these, in one way or another, **said the Ellimist, **owe allegiance to the oldest and most terrible of them all: an ancient entity of inexhaustible malevolence, who goes by the name of Crayak. It is with him, accordingly, that we deal most often – so often that our dealings have come to resemble a vast game of strategy, with elaborate rules born of mutual distrust and fear of each other's power.**

**For countless eons, these rules have satisfied both my people and Crayak and his followers. Neither has found them so burdensome that they have felt forced to rebel against what we might call the referee – an action that would surely have catastrophic consequences for the opposing party, as well as for reality as a whole. It is a state of affairs that took hundreds of millennia to arrange, and neither Crayak nor I desire to see it upset. And that is why your presence in this universe causes us such concern.**

"My presence?" I repeated. "How can I cause you any problems? I'd never even heard of you until about five minutes ago."

**No, **said the Ellimist. **But you present us with a problem, all the same. The "rules" of our "game" presuppose this universe to be a closed system; if sentient beings begin to enter it from other universes, the equilibrium is significantly disturbed. It would be as if two of your human chess masters suddenly found a fifth knight on their board, neither white nor black.**

The comparison rang a bell in my mind. I'd almost forgotten about my delirium at the end of Ninno's fugue; I'd figured that none of the images I'd seen meant anything, so there was no point in remembering them. But, if this Ellimist and Crayak had been watching me at the time, maybe Ninno's last telepathic spasm had given me a kind of glimpse into their world. I'd had weirder things happen to me.

"Are you the hedgehog or the eye?" I blurted out.

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized what a stupid way it was to ask the question. But evidently the Ellimist understood it anyway, because he answered instantly, **The hedgehog.**

I nodded. "Good. I didn't much like the other guy."

**Few beings do, **said the Ellimist. **Whether that is the reason for his hatred of all living things, or a result thereof, I cannot say. In any event, you may rest assured that he does not like you, either.**

Well, that wasn't surprising, of course, but it wasn't exactly comforting, either. "Um… okay, right. So does that mean he's going to try and… you know, kill me?" I tried to say it casually, but it's kind of hard to do that with that kind of question.

**No, **said the Ellimist. **At least, not necessarily. What he will do, if you remain – and what I and my people will do, as well – is to exploit the ambiguity that you represent.**

I stared. "I don't get it."

The Ellimist sighed inside my head. **It is difficult to explain without telling you too much, **he said. **Perhaps you will understand best if you think in terms of wheelchair rugby. Each player has a point value based on the extent of his motor control; the greater his capacity to affect the outcome of the game, the more points he receives. And no team can use more than eight points' worth of its players at any time.**

I started to see. "And that's what it's like with you and Crayak? The more powerful someone is, the more careful you guys have to be with him?"

**Yes and no,** said the Ellimist. **It is not power, as you understand it, that is the pivotal factor; it is a different characteristic, of which your race has no conception. Suffice it to say that, when a sentient being is conceived, a new thread is woven into the fabric of the universe – and some threads are woven more deeply than others, and require greater delicacy to rearrange.**

I got a sudden picture of Richard, playing one of his MORPHHOGs or whatever they're called – you know, those week-long video games where everyone's a different character – and having a screen pop up that said, "VISSER SEVEN: +500 DESTINY POINTS. UNPLAYABLE AT THIS TIME." It was all I could do to stifle a giggle.

**Your thread, however, **the Ellimist continued, **is not woven into this universe at all. From a plintconarhythmic standpoint, it is as though you did not exist. Yet you can, in all likelihood, affect the universe to a sizable extent. It is as though one of the healthiest of wheelchair-rugby players was accidentally given a point value of 0.**

I nodded. "Yeah, that could be awkward."

**Exceedingly so, **said the Ellimist. **Of course, if you were to return to your universe with the rest of the Morph Force, all would be well. Any distortions caused by your brief stay here could be easily dealt with. But we cannot force you to leave. We do not interfere in the affairs of sentient beings. All we can do is show you the consequences of your choice.**

He said something else, too, but I don't think it was to me. Very faintly, like a tickle at the edge of my mind, I thought I could just make out the words, **Curse the Ssstram.**

I wondered, later, what that was about. Had he and Crayak run into the Ssstram before? Had their weird time-distortion tricks messed up the game somehow? Maybe they'd become such a nuisance that both sides had agreed to wipe them from this universe completely – something I saw later made that seem particularly likely – and reshuffle the Yeerks who invaded them back into the Hork-Bajir/Taxxon side of the War. Or maybe I was just imagining things.

Anyway, I didn't think much about it then. The other thing the Ellimist had said was taking up too much of my attention. "Show me?" I repeated. "What do you mean, show me?"

The Ellimist smiled, showing all of Lapkin's teeth. **That is why I am here,** he said. **One of the advantages of our state of existence is the ability to remove mortal beings from their surroundings and place them in ephemeral worlds of our own construction. I have been sent to show you this world as it will be if you stay.**

"But… but I thought you said you didn't know what the world would be like if I stayed," I said. "Wasn't that the point, that I introduced too much uncertainty?"

**Yes,** said the Ellimist. **But there is such a thing as probability. The most knowledgeable among us have calculated three possible futures; based on our own tactics and what we know of Crayak's, there is a 97.3% likelihood that one of these three will be the true future. I am to show you each of them in turn.**

"Oh," I said, a little dazed. "Okay."

**You accept?**

I blinked. "You mean I can refuse?"

**Certainly,** said the Ellimist. **Did you think we would force you to see such things as your likely future holds? We are not completely abandoned, young wanderer Eldora.**

The way he said it made me shiver. Did I really want to see this? Did I really want to stay here at all, if it would make things that bad? Maybe I should just excuse myself, morph to chickadee, and get the heck down to the clearing ASAP.

Then I realized that freaking me out might have been just what the Ellimist was trying to do. If he and the other Ellimists had been watching me as long as he said, they must have figured out by now that I tended to think with my emotions – and it was pretty clear that playing stimulus-response games with beings like me was second nature to them. Probably the entire race was watching me right now, waiting to see if I caved.

Well, once I'd thought of that, there wasn't much choice. "Okay," I said. "I'm ready. Yeah, I accept."

**Good, **said the Ellimist. **Here is the first possibility.**

The next second, my bedroom was gone. Just like that: no warning, no hint, no nothing. It was like someone had flipped a switch; one second, the two of us were sitting on a small brass bed with Hello-Kitty-themed walls around us, and the next second we were… somewhere different.

Very, very different.


	29. First Vision

"What… how did we get here?" I said.

**We are not here,** said the Ellimist. **I am where I have been for a hundred magnennia, and you are still in your counterpart's bedroom. This is merely a projection, imposed upon your senses so that you may observe the various futures that may await you.**

I had to take his word for it; it was his idea, after all. But it sure looked to me like the two of us were standing in the middle of a tropical swamp, and it took all my credulity to believe otherwise.

Actually, it wasn't quite a swamp. The part I was standing on felt pretty solid, and there was long grass and stuff growing on it. But the Ellimist – or his Lapkin-shaped projection – was sitting right on top of the murky water, with little blue fish swimming around beneath his paws. I was pretty sure he was just showing off, and I tried to keep my eyes from bugging out, but I'm not sure I succeeded.

I looked around to see if I could figure out what continent we were on. The local plants didn't help me much (botany's not one of my best subjects), but then I saw some fish in the river that I thought I recognized from one of our first missions.

"Are those piranhas?" I said.

The Ellimist nodded.

"Then this is South America?"

**This is the Pantanal,** said the Ellimist.

"The what?"

**An immense lowland area surrounding the Paraguay River and several of its tributaries,** said the Ellimist. **At present, it varies seasonally between drought and flooding, but in this future, due to a slight change in the Earth's climate, it is an island-studded marshland all the year round.**

"Global warming, you mean," I said, wondering whether Al Gore had ever expected to be vindicated by a super-powered alien.

**No,** said the Ellimist. **It had nothing to do with carbon-dioxide emissions or Malenkovich cycles. My co-racialists and I altered the atmosphere directly.**

I blinked. "You did? Why?"

Instead of answering, the Ellimist gestured with a paw towards the water. It looked like he was pointing at the piranhas; they'd found something at the bottom of the river, and they were all clustering around it and doing their skeletonize-a-cow-in-five-minutes thing. I leaned forward, being careful not to fall in (which was pretty stupid, since I wasn't really there, but, like I said, that was hard to remember), and tried to see if I could figure out what it was they were eating.

It was big, whatever it was. There must have been at least six dozen piranhas down there, but they still couldn't cover it entirely; I saw a little bit of green tail poking out, for instance, and one of the scaly, three-toed foot was just visible. At first, I thought it might be a crocodile of some kind – but then the piranhas finished with the head and swam a little ways downwards, and I got a clear view of the three horns and the long, toothy beak.

I felt suddenly sick to my stomach. I suppose I've seen hundreds of dead Hork-Bajir in my life, but I don't think I'll ever really get used to it – and there was something especially horrible about the way the piranhas were feeding on this one. I mean, I know that there have to be scavengers in the world, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

**The bed of the Paraguay is littered with such corpses, **said the Ellimist, for all the world as though he was narrating a nature special. **They are the remains of those Controllers who, having subjugated all the other peoples of Earth, attempted to claim the Pantanal as well. They would likely have succeeded, if the inhospitable terrain and the continual rains had not impeded their efforts; as it was, the few hundred humans dwelling on these small islands managed to fend off their attackers, and the Visserarchy has never thought it worthwhile to offer them a second challenge.**

He turned and gave me a meaningful look, but I hadn't quite recovered from seeing the Hork-Bajir skull yet, and it took me a few seconds to get it. When I did, I felt a shiver go down my spine. "You mean… it's a preserve? You and the other Ellimists tweaked the weather to make the Yeerks lose, so that… so that there would still be free humans somewhere?"

**It was all that we could do,** said the Ellimist. **I cannot, of course, tell you the details – that would compromise your freedom of action, should you choose to remain in this universe – but what you are seeing is the result of Crayak's deft use of you, at certain key moments, to demoralize the Earthly resistance.**

"Oh," I said quietly.

The Ellimist didn't say anything; he just stared at me with those big, green eyes of Lapkin's, and, for a minute or two, the only sound was the noise of the piranhas munching on the dead Hork-Bajir. Then even that stopped; the piranhas ran out of meat and swam away, leaving just these pale Hork-Bajir bones gleaming up out of the water at me. It made me uncomfortable to look at it, and I raised my head and stared vaguely down the shore of the island.

I swear the Ellimist was waiting for me to do that. The instant I looked up, the grass rustled, and a girl about my age came down to the riverside and started filling a small urn with water.

She was a few inches taller than I was, but I doubt she was any heavier; her rough, brown wrap hung loose on her body, and her arms were so thin I could almost see the bone. Except for that, she looked basically like an ordinary Hispanic girl, except that her skin was maybe a little darker than most of the Hispanics I see in America. I was trying to remember if Paraguay was close enough to the Equator that that made sense, when for some reason the girl turned and looked up at me.

Yeah, I know: she wasn't looking at me, because I wasn't there; she was looking up at the sky, or at the next island to the west, or just staring off into space the way we all do sometimes. But the point is that her eyes met mine.

I'd never seen human eyes look like that before. Even in the Yeerk pool, which I'd always thought of as the ultimate in dehumanization, there's always been that little gleam of hope that keeps the hosts screaming pointlessly at the guards. This girl didn't have that. She was more alive than most of the Controllers I've seen, but it was life the way a ground squirrel is alive: huddling out of sight as much as you can, always being afraid that something bigger and more powerful is going to get you – and not minding. That was the horrible thing. This girl was living like a mouse waiting for the hawk, and I don't think it ever crossed her mind that she could live any other way.

I wondered, later on, how long before that scene the Yeerk attack on the Pantanal had taken place – whether the girl had actually been conceived and born in that animal fear. I wondered whether the Ellimist actually knew that much about the cosmos and all its creatures, if he thought that this was any way to preserve humanity. I wondered what the matter was with the Yeerks, that they felt like they had to do this sort of thing to other races. I wondered why I had been born.

At the time, though, I didn't bother to wonder about anything. I just let out a little moan, turned to the Ellimist, and said, "Can we go somewhere else now, please?"

**No, **said the Ellimist, with the faintest touch of amusement in his tone. **But I can project you into a different possible future – though I warn you that you may not like it any better.**

I waved a hand. "Yeah, yeah, whatever. Just do it."

And, just like that, he did.


	30. Second Vision

We were inside, this time – inside some kind of windowless building with pale-green, stone walls, all covered in elaborate carvings. The room was a kind of oval shape, with a domed ceiling; it looked pretty secure, but something about it made me nervous, like it was about to collapse at any second. It took me a while to realize that what I was reacting to was the sounds from outside; it wasn't constant, but every so often you could hear the sound of water rippling, or something swimming past. And I have bad experiences with underwater buildings.

But I didn't really notice all that at first. What really got my attention was the group of people scattered around the room. There were four of them: a short boy with brown hair, an old Andalite with a bandaged leg, a black girl sitting on the floor with an anxious look on her face, and…

I blinked twice, just to make sure I was seeing clearly. Yep, no question about it: that short girl with dirty-blonde hair, standing a little apart from the others under a protruding carving of an alien fish's head – that was definitely an older version of me.

Once I got over the initial shock, I realized that made sense. If I was the focal point for all these different versions of the future, I should have expected that I would be around for at least one of them. But who were these others, then? And what was I doing in this wherever-it-was with them?

I glanced at the Ellimist expectantly, but evidently he wasn't going to play tour guide this time. He just gestured with his paw toward the center of the room, as if to tell me to keep quiet and just watch. (I swear, he looked just like Mom when he did that – except for being a cat, of course.)

So I watched. I wasn't sure what I was watching for, but I tried to keep my eyes fixed on the center of the room just the same. That was harder than it sounds, though, since I kept getting distracted by the people in the room – the other girl, especially. I'd been right about her looking anxious, but there was more to it than that; she almost looked haunted, somehow, like that one composer probably looked when he thought the invisible hyenas were chasing him, and then anxious on top of that. It made me want to go over and hug her – only I couldn't, since she wasn't really there. That was frustrating.

Anyway, I kept looking over to her, or sometimes to one of the others, and then I had to make myself focus on the place again where the Ellimist had pointed. After about a minute of this, I was getting a little impatient, and I was just starting to wonder what it was that was so important about the empty center of this room – and then, all of a sudden, it wasn't empty anymore.

I don't know any other way to describe it. It just filled up, between one blink and the next. It was a lot like the way the Ellimist had been changing things: now it's my bedroom, and, whoops, now it's the Pantanal. Same thing here. First there was nothing in the center of the room, and then, whoops, there was a gorilla, and a tiger, and a big, white ball about a foot taller than I was.

The girl made a sound that could have been either a cry of joy or a groan. Whichever it was, it got the others' attention; the other me jumped, and the old Andalite turned and limped forward. «Welcome, friends,» he said. «Have you achieved your purpose?»

The tiger and the gorilla looked at each other. «Yeah,» said the tiger. «Yeah, I guess we have.»

(That's a funny thing, by the way, that I hadn't noticed until just now. It was pretty obvious that these were both people in morph. And it's impossible to tell where thought-speak is coming from. But I knew, somehow, that it was the tiger who had spoken, not the gorilla.)

«Yeah, we achieved our purpose,» said the tiger. «The Qualls aren't our problem anymore. They won't be anyone's problem for a long time.»

_Qualls?_ I wondered. Was that a race, an organization, or some kind of natural disaster?

«That is well,» said the Andalite.

«You're very kind, sir,» said the gorilla sarcastically. «But we already knew that, didn't we?»

"Oh, stop it, Marco," said the girl.

The gorilla looked surprised. «I just meant…»

"I know what you meant," said the girl. "Just stop it, can't you? Stop acting like the world is still the way the six of us remember it. We don't need to be reminded, Prince Seerow least of all."

My jaw dropped. _Seerow?_ There was only one Andalite that I knew of named Seerow, and I was pretty sure there would never be another one; no Andalite mother would name her son after the prince who gave the Yeerks space travel. Did that mean that this was…?

While I was still processing that one, the tiger came up to the girl and touched her hand with his paw. «Give Marco a break, Cassie,» he said. «He's just trying to cope, the same way we all are. I know it makes your dreams worse when people talk about the pre-shift days, but sometimes you just have to deal.»

His voice was stern, but you could tell from the way he was looking at her that this Cassie girl was someone special to him. And you could tell that he was special to Cassie, too, the way that she leaned forward and buried herself in his side. "Jake, what am I going to do?" she whispered. "I can't go on like this. I just can't."

«Yes, you can,» said Jake firmly. «And you will. I know you, Cassie. I don't care how much Alloran distorted the universe when he wiped out the Yeerk Adam and Eve; there's one thing he couldn't do, and that's turn Cassie Freeman into the kind of person who knowingly does the wrong thing.»

Cassie shook her head. "It's not the same, Jake," she said. "I don't even know what's real anymore, let alone what's…"

"Where's Ax?" I interrupted. (I mean, not the real me, but the other me – the one under the fish carving.)

There was an awkward silence for a second or two, and then the gorilla – Marco – said, «With the Qualls.»

"Oh," the other me said softly. "You mean he…"

«It was his own choice,» said Jake. «He said that an Andalite had unleashed them on the galaxy, and it ought to be an Andalite that got rid of them.»

«It is well,» said Prince Seerow. «We must tell the Shaveet, and all the other organs of the Quall-enthralled races. So long as life in the galaxy endures, the name of Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill must not be forgotten.»

_Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill_. I frowned; I knew I'd heard that name before, somewhere. Before I could place it, though, Marco was talking again. «And how long will that be, do you think, sir?» he said.

Prince Seerow cocked his head. «I beg your pardon?»

«I'm thinking about this thing,» said Marco, tapping his knuckles against the white ball. «Look at the situation we're in. Rachel, Aldrea, and now Ax are all dead, you're permanently injured, Cassie's a candidate for the loony bin, God only knows what happened to Tobias – oh, and then there's the small matter of a race that didn't even exist two months ago suddenly having terrorized over the whole galaxy for the last fifty millennia. All that, just because we Animorphs were stupid enough to use the Time Matrix "just this once". So if we leave it lying around, and someone decides to use it again, I wouldn't want to bet on life in the galaxy enduring much longer.»

Jake sighed. «Did you have something in mind, Marco?» he said. «You know we can't destroy it, and anyplace we hide it would have to be more secure than the last place it was hidden – and what's more secure than under a pyramid in the middle of the desert?»

"Plenty of places, actually," said the boy. (I gave a little start; he'd been so quiet, I'd forgotten he was there.) "I don't like to say it, but I think my masters made a mistake about the Time Matrix. They told us to put it in a place 'suitable to the greatest of treasures', and so the base of the Great Pyramid seemed appropriate. I don't think it ever occurred to them that another race might see it as the most powerful of all weapons; if they had, it probably never would have made it to Earth at all."

"What do you mean?" said the other me.

"I mean that there are other planets in the Solar System," said the boy (or whatever he was; he sounded almost like Chester, talking about "his masters" that way). "Bigger planets, with Van Allen belts powerful enough to drown out even the most absurd energy readings. If the Time Matrix had been on Jupiter, that Skrit Na scavenger would never have noticed it – and, even if he had, he couldn't possibly have survived in Jovian gravity long enough to abscond with it."

Jake looked thoughtful. «That's reasonable enough,» he said, «but who's going to bell the cat? None of us could survive on Jupiter long enough to drop the Time Matrix there, any more than the Skrit Na could to pick it up.»

«He's saying that he could,» said Marco. «That's your idea, right, Erek? You interface with the Time Matrix and have it send the two of you to the Great Red Spot?»

"Yes," said Erek. "The gravity wouldn't destroy me – at least, I don't think it would. If your scientists are right, and the planet turns out to have a liquid middle layer, I might even be slightly mobile: a swimmer in Marduk's endless seas. And if not, I can always go into hibernation mode until… well, until."

"Oh, don't be so noble, Erek," said Cassie desperately. "How can you even think about this? Haven't we lost enough people already?"

"I'm not a person, Cassie," said Erek softly. "I'm an android. And, besides, Marco's right: so long as there's the remotest chance of someone finding and using the Time Matrix again, everyone in the universe is in danger. I was built to serve and care for sentient beings; this is what I have to do."

Nobody seemed to have any answer to that. Erek turned to Prince Seerow. "I hope you don't mind my not calling you 'sir'," he said with a slight smile, "seeing as how you're several millennia my junior. But I just wanted to say – and Cassie, feel free to cover your ears – that, where I come from, we placed great store by kindness, and we didn't tend to qualify it with reference to prudence. So meeting someone whose kindness was once legendary throughout the galaxy – well, it's been a great honor for me."

Prince Seerow's eyes twinkled in an Andalite smile. «Good luck, Chee-sendo,» he said.

Erek nodded, and turned and walked, amid total silence, toward the white ball that I supposed was the Time Matrix. He lowered his hologram, placed his two android hands against its surface, and remained motionless for a second or two; then, as suddenly as before, both he and it were gone.

The silence lasted a moment longer, and then Jake and Marco started to demorph. They had only gotten partway, though – just enough for me to see that Marco wasn't very tall, and that Jake had really nice hands – when the world suddenly froze, and the Ellimist was standing in front of me instead of beside me. **You have, I think, some questions,** he said.

That was putting it mildly. I sorted through my mind, trying to figure out which question would lead best to all the others; then I realized that I wouldn't know that until I had the answers, so I just picked the first one that came to mind. "'Animorphs'?"

**The group of five humans and one Andalite that, in this universe, received the morphing power from the dying Prince Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul, and now defend the Earth thereby, **said the Ellimist. **They are analogous, almost precisely, to your own Morph Force.**

"I see," I said, feeling really grateful to Abby for thinking up so much less stupid a name for our version. "So the people I just saw – Jake and Marco and Cassie: that was them?"

**Those were three of them,** said the Ellimist. **As Marco observed, the other three – Rachel Kopp, Tobias Halden, and Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill – are either dead or nonexistent at this point in this future.**

"And how…" I started. Then one of the names he had just listed rang a belated bell in my head. "Wait a second… did you say Tobias Halden?"

**Yes,** said the Ellimist. **Elfangor's son is one of the Animorphs. **He paused, and then added, **So is Elfangor's brother.**

I think he'd seen my thoughts earlier, and was trying to be helpful. Anyway, the connection my mind had been trying to make fell into place at that. Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill: of course, that was the other _aristh_ who had landed with Anifal, the one who had been shot by a hunter while he was in deer morph. Prince Elfangor's brother, yes.

I didn't bother asking why Tobias had survived in this universe and Anifal hadn't. So much else was different in this universe, a little thing like that barely mattered. Instead, I finished the question I'd started to ask earlier. "And how did I meet them?"

The Ellimist was silent, and I remembered what he'd said earlier about not telling me anything that would change my actions in the future. "Okay, forget that question," I said. "How about this one? What's a Quall?"

**The Qualls were the dominant race on a planet not far from the Skrit Na homeworld, **said the Ellimist. **They were part of a family of animals that could attack their prey emotionally as well as physically; in the Qualls themselves, this ability was so refined as to be almost magical. Put simply, if a member of another race looked a Quall in the eye, the Quall had almost total control over that being's emotions and perceptions.**

I shivered. "So they could alter your feelings to make you more vulnerable? Make you hopelessly afraid, or miserable, for no good reason?"

**Exactly,** said the Ellimist. **Or they could create illusions – the sensation of being burned alive, for instance. Some of their more adept hunters even had the ability to convince a being's bloodstream that it could not seal a wound.**

"That's horrible," I said.

**Yes,** said the Ellimist. **Fortunately, while they were still in a fairly primitive state, they were conquered and subjugated by a race of Yeerks known as the Yoort, who found them very useful as shock troops. Later on, when the Yoort developed genetic science and abandoned infestation, they released the Qualls – taking care, of course, to modify their mesmeric skills – but, by this point, the Qualls were a chastened people, and had some experience of solidarity with the Yoort's other host races. They settled on a distant moon in the Sagittarius Arm, and never became a scourge to other races.**

I'd never heard of the Yoort before, but I figured I could guess the rest from what I'd already heard. "But that Time Matrix thing changed everything, right?" I said. "The Animorphs found it under a pyramid somehow, and they used it to go back in time and keep Prince Seerow from giving space travel to the Yeerks, and then this Alloran guy took it and used it to keep the Yeerks from ever existing in the first place. So there were no Yoort to conquer the Qualls, which meant that the Qualls got to run amok in the galaxy. And that's why Prince Seerow's leg was wounded, and why Cassie was such an emotional wreck. Battle scars."

I was pretty pleased with myself, and the Ellimist almost looked impressed. **Almost exactly correct,** he said. **In fact, when the Animorphs discovered the Time Matrix, it had already been moved from its resting-place under the Great Pyramid. And Cassie Freeman's emotional strain was caused not by the Qualls, but by her own unusual sensitivity to temporal distortions. But, in essence, it is as you have said.**

"And that won't happen if I don't stay in this universe," I said.

**It is very unlikely.**

I took a deep breath. "Okay," I said. "Option one, the Yeerks take over the Earth. Option two, the Yeerks never exist, and the Qualls spread misery and terror everywhere. What's option three?"

**Would you really like to know?** said the Ellimist.

I nodded.

**Then look around you, Eldora.**


	31. Third Vision

My first thought when I saw the third projection was that Ellimists must really have a thing about water. First a South American swamp, then an undersea fortress in who-knows-where, and now someplace that looked like the seashore we used to visit every summer – before I had my run-in with the jellyfish, I mean, and developed my little phobia about beaches.

I looked around nervously, to see if there was anything crawling around in the sand – and then I nearly jumped out of my skin. At the margin of the sea, not more than a yard from where I was standing, some huge, furry, featureless _thing_ was crawling up out of the water.

Okay, so "huge" is an exaggeration. The tallest part of it probably wasn't any higher off the ground than my knee, and I don't suppose it was more than four and a half feet long. But it was still too big. Something like that should never be big enough to see without a microscope.

You know when you're cleaning out the fridge, and you find something that used to be a chicken breast or whatever, and now it's all covered in slime and fuzzy little mold colonies? Okay, imagine that that chicken breast is four feet long, and moving. That's what I was seeing on this beach.

I knew the Ellimist was watching me, so I tried not to react, but I couldn't quite keep a kind of choked squeak from escaping. And then I got mad at myself, the way I always do when I've made myself feel like a baby instead of a brave warrior. I know you're not supposed to compare yourself to other people, but, seriously, even Abby – she'd have been grossed out, sure, but she wouldn't have squealed about it. She'd probably have just wrinkled her nose and made some ironic comment about what a charming vacation spot the Ellimist had found.

I tried to think of something like that to say, but all I could come up with was, "Okay, so… where are we now?"

**In your bedroom,** said the Ellimist.

I rolled my eyes. "Yeah, all right. I know that. I mean, where's this place you're showing me?"

**In your bedroom,** the Ellimist repeated. **If you were to dig far enough beneath this sand, you would, I believe, find the remains of your house's foundation.**

I stared at him. "But… my house is nowhere near the sea."

**Not at the moment,** said the Ellimist. **But your neighborhood has been shoreline before, and, in time, it will be again. To rise and fall is the nature of ocean.**

I thought about that for a moment. "Okay," I said. "So you're saying that we're in the really distant future this time?"

The Ellimist gave me a sly look – which, since he was wearing Lapkin's face, was pretty easy. **I suppose that depends on your point of view,** he said. **The year A.D. 30000000 would not seem especially remote to my people.**

My jaw dropped. "Thirty million _years?_" I blurted. "What am I supposed to have done that's going to affect the Earth for the next thirty million years?"

**Nothing**, said the Ellimist. **It is what Crayak and I will agree to do because of you that will have so profound an effect on your world. Look around you, Eldora – and consider not what you see, but what you do not.**

I had no idea what that meant, but I looked around obediently. Apart from the crawling nightmare at the sea's margin, this beach looked pretty much the way I remembered the old beach looking: same white sand next to the water, same tough, prickly grass beyond that, same clear, blue sky overhead…

I paused, and glanced up again. Now that I thought about it, the sky was a little _too_ clear. Judging by the sun, this was just about the time of day when it should have been swarming with gulls. But it wasn't – and, when I made myself look down again, I noticed that there weren't any plovers scurrying across the sand, either. Just a few things that looked like crabs, and the Muppephone from Hell slowly writhing toward a nearby dune.

I swallowed, remembering that line in "The Walrus and the Carpenter" that had given me nightmares when Daddy read it to me at bedtime. _The sea was wet as wet could be; the sands were dry as dry. You could not see a cloud, because no cloud was in the sky. No birds were flying overhead: there were no birds to fly._

"The birds?" I said, turning back to the Ellimist.

He nodded.

"What happened?"

**We erased them, **said the Ellimist, making a sweeping gesture with his tail. **Crayak and I. It was part of our compromise – a compromise as unsatisfactory as compromises usually are.**

I stared. "I don't get it."

**We had to eliminate you, **said the Ellimist. **As you have seen in the previous two instances, you offer each of us an incomparable opportunity to reshape the timeline to his own tactical advantage. Neither of us, in the long run, is really comfortable with the notion of such a wild card roaming loose in our universe. In this future, therefore – which is, I may add, by far the most likely – we have agreed to remove you utterly from reality. But our rules do not permit us to destroy sentient beings, except as a corollary consequence of some other action. So we arranged for a certain event to take place, insignificant in itself, but which resulted, after four Earth years had passed, in the painless annihilation of all vertebrate life on your planet.**

I gaped at him. "You mean you killed everything on Earth that had a backbone?"

**They were not **_**killed**_**, **said the Ellimist, sounding a little testy. **They were erased. No violence was involved; they simply ceased to exist.**

"Okay, fine," I said, "but, if they ceased to exist, that means they stopped being alive, right?"

**Naturally.**

"And that was because of something you and Crayak did," I said. "They stopped living because of you two. That means you killed them, doesn't it?"

The Ellimist sighed. **If you must think of it that way, then yes, it does, **he said.

I could just hear the undertone there: _Of course, if you weren't such a limited, ignorant human, you'd know better than to think that way._ Just like the Planned Parenthood people, whenever anyone mentioned that abortion was murder.

For a second, I was too annoyed to say anything; then, since I still had "The Walrus and the Carpenter" in my head, I blurted out, "You're both very unpleasant characters!"

The Ellimist laughed, which annoyed me even more. **Perhaps, **he said. **But that is not the question now. You have seen the future; you know, now, what will come of your staying in this universe. What is your decision?**

That brought me back to the present. (Well, not really, but you know what I mean.) I'd almost forgotten what all of this was for; now it all came flooding back into my mind. I had to decide what I was going to do – whether I was going to go back to the Morph Force and spend the rest of my life tearing people apart with my teeth, or stay here and wait for a bunch of aliens with God complexes to decide which nightmare they wanted to use me to bring to life.

But there was something else I had to do, first. Maybe it was irrational of me, but I just couldn't feel comfortable on an Earth that didn't have any birds. Like I said, only six species at the feeder makes it a bad day for me; I don't know how Anifal survived, living on an entire planet that only had three. Even while I was listening to the Ellimist, I'd caught myself straining my ears, hoping that maybe I'd hear the call of one that he and Crayak had missed. I needed there to be at least one, somewhere on the planet; then I could think about more important things.

And the nice thing about having morphing power is that, if you need a bird, you can get one.

I took off my glasses, closed my eyes, and focused on my hummingbird morph. (Not the chickadee, since I didn't want to be looking up at the Ellimist when I made my decision. And not my Diatryma, since that would just have been showing off – and, besides, morphing big things is a bad idea when you're wearing more than just your morphing outfit.) At first, I wondered whether I would be able to morph – if I wasn't really here, did that mean that this wasn't really my body? – but then I felt the feathers tracing themselves on my skin, and smiled to myself. The Ellimist wasn't stupid, anyway; he knew that, if he just made sure to leave me my favorite toy, I wouldn't be able to be really mad at him.

* * *

And, sure enough, once I was fully morphed, and had risen out of the heap of my clothes on my little helicopter wings, all my unhappiness and pique evaporated like dew in the morning. I mean, how can anyone be unhappy when she's in morph? On the inside, I was still a girl, but now I had wings, and I could drink from flowers, and I sparkled in the sun like an emerald. What's more amazing than that?

Maybe part of that was the hummingbird's instincts: _come on, let's go, no time for moping!_ But, whatever it was, I was glad to feel it. If nothing else, it made my mind about six times clearer; when I focused on the stay-or-go problem again, it was like being at the optometrist's office and getting my right glasses back again. Things just snapped into focus, and I wondered how I'd managed to ignore them all that time.

For one thing, I realized that the Ellimist was probably stacking the deck. He _wanted_ me to leave, so he was deliberately showing me the worst side of what would happen if I stayed. And he hadn't said anything about what would happen if I _didn't_ stay; how did I know that that wouldn't be just as bad? After all, he'd definitely said that the first two scenes were about the two sides' "tactical advantages" – so, however this "game" of theirs worked, one side scored by having the Yeerks take over Earth, and the other side scored by having the Qualls come back from the dead. With people like that in charge, wasn't this version of Earth pretty much doomed no matter what happened?

But that wasn't really my problem. That was the other thing I realized: that I couldn't make my decision based on what was going to happen in _this_ universe. That wasn't where my responsibilities were. Maybe it would be if I stayed, but, right now, I belonged to another world – a world where Prince Elfangor was remembered as a dangerous rebel, and the former Visser Three was rotting in a watery grave. That was the world I needed to be worried about harming.

I flew over to where the Ellimist was sitting and hovered in front of him, so that my eyes were directly in front of his. «What about my own universe?» I said. «What's going to happen there if I stay here?»

It's hard to tell on a cat's face, but I think the Ellimist frowned. **That is difficult to say, **he said. **Those threads are not present to us. We cannot calculate the probabilities of what we cannot see.**

«Well, you can see my double and the other Morph Forcers,» I pointed out. «Can't you calculate the probabilities of what they'll do, at least?»

**It is unlikely, **said the Ellimist. **Without an environmental context…**

Then he paused, and his eyes went all spacey, like he was listening to something. I waited for a second or two (impatiently bobbing up and down a little bit, since hummingbirds hate to wait for anything); then I saw him nod slightly, and look at me again. **I spoke too soon, it seems, **he said. **There is, indeed, one thing that we can predict with near certainty will happen in your universe if you do not return. Do you wish to experience it?**

«Yes, please,» I said.

**So be it.**


	32. Final Vision

If I'd thought the first three projections were weird, they were nothing next to what I saw now. I'm not even sure _saw_ is the right word for what I did – not that sight wasn't part of it, but there was all kinds of other information I was getting that human eyes (or, actually, hummingbird eyes, since I was still in morph) just couldn't have processed. It reminded me of that book Mom likes, about the hundred secret senses.

The best way of describing it is that I was seeing relationships, not things – or that I was seeing things, but only as much as was necessary to see their relationships. It was like every real thing was the center of a bunch of glowing threads, and what I was seeing was the web that those threads made. Maybe that's what people mean when they talk about the fabric of the universe.

**This may be difficult for your mind to process,** came the Ellimist's voice. (His Lapkin-body had disappeared, or maybe was hiding somewhere in the threads.) **It is, however, the most nearly adequate way of showing you what you need to see. As I said, we cannot perceive your universe directly; consequently, any reproduction of it that was not in this simplified form – which we call a **_**palant**_** – would almost certainly be highly inaccurate.**

I didn't see how a universe-sized network of interwoven destinies was a simplified version of anything, except maybe in the sense that computer programmers think six pages of gibberish is simpler than a Web page. But I didn't say that to the Ellimist (though I'm sure he knew I was thinking it). Instead, I said, «Well, I'd hate to make you do anything inadequate. So what _is_ it that I'm supposed to see, anyway?»

As soon as I'd said it, the web suddenly changed. It's hard to describe the change in words; it was like seeing a movie camera suddenly zoom in on one small part of a scene, except that it felt like I _was_ the movie camera. Anyway, instead of a general picture of the whole galaxy, I suddenly had a very vivid, very specific picture of a handful of people.

Some of those people, of course, were the five of us, the Morph Force – except that, instead of me, there was my parallel-universe double at one of the thread centers. I'd expected that much: my staying here would probably affect the rest of the Morph Force pretty directly, and, anyway, the other Morph Forcers were the only parts of my universe that the Ellimists could analyze.

But it wasn't just the five of us. There were two other people woven into it, too: one was Andrea, and the other was her Controller, Sarem. They weren't exactly interacting with the others, but just the fact of their being there was affecting all the relationships, because… No, wait a minute, that couldn't be right… but it sure did look like…

**Yes, Eldora,** said the Ellimist.** You are reading the **_**palant**_** correctly.**

«But… but Josh wouldn't kill Andrea's Controller before the war was over,» I said. «I know he wouldn't. I've asked him to – I've _begged_ him to – but he's always said that we can't single out individual Yeerks that way, or they might guess that we're not Andalites.»

**Exactly,** said the Ellimist. **And he would not have done so in this future, had it not been for the influence of your counterpart. You are a warrior, Eldora, though you do not think of yourself as such; you have a warrior's instinctive grasp of such virtues as patient endurance and self-denial. Your counterpart at one time had this, too, but Ninno Five-Six-Three has been a cruel master to her, and she is emotionally much weaker than she used to be – and has, moreover, a violent hatred of Yeerks as such that you do not possess. If she returns to your world with your brother, she will prevail upon him to kill Sarem Eight-Nine-Nought, and the result will be – what you see.**

And the horrible thing was, I _did_ see. The threads between the Morph-Force nodes were so clear that not only did I see the relationships between Josh and Richard and Abby and Anifal, but I could actually see some of their thoughts. Not all of them – I still couldn't see what Richard's favorite _Star Trek_ episode was, or how Anifal felt about his parents – but everything in their minds, no matter how secret, that had to do with Sarem's death was clear as day to me. It made me feel dirty, almost treacherous, like a peeping Tom or something; I couldn't believe I had ever been jealous of Josh for getting to morph a Leeran.

I tried to close my eyes and not look, but it didn't do any good. I wasn't seeing the threads with my eyes; I was seeing them with those other senses, and I had no idea how to shut those off. So the inmost thoughts of my closest friends kept throbbing their way into my mind, and there was nothing I could do about it.

_Too much is too much,_ thought Richard._ That's all there is to it. I know I promised myself at the beginning of all this that I wouldn't set myself up as a rival to Josh – because divided loyalties only weaken a cause, the Morph Force is Earth's only hope, yadda yadda yadda – but what am I supposed to do? Just let this paranoid clone of Elly's keep dictating how we fight the Yeerks? How is that being loyal to the Morph Force's cause? How close do we have to get to the pulsar before I can step in and say, "Belay that order, Ensign"?_

_Okay, Josh, _thought Abby, _it's your call. I'm not going to abandon you, least of all now. But you know as well as I do that you've crossed a Rubicon here. This isn't just a war of Yeerks and humans anymore; it's personal now. And if it's personal, I'm going to fight personal. So if that Controller at the deli who's always looking speculatively at Grandma turns up in the river one morning with ten milligrams of coral-snake venom in his veins, you'll have no-one to blame but yourself for the consequences._

_Why are the Andalites doing this? _thought Andrea._ What did we ever do to them? Sarem's not a visser or a council member; she's not even in an important century. She's just a person doing what people like her have to do, because life doesn't give them any other options. And besides, I need her. She's been taking care of everything for me since before I can remember; how am I supposed to handle things on my own all of a sudden? The Andalites won't help me; they just care about beating the Visserarchy. And the other Yeerks won't help me; if I tell them I've met the Andalites, they'll send me to Visser Seven, and who knows what will happen then. So what can I do?_

_Another one down, _thought my double._ Good. They all need to go, one by one. It's like in double solitaire: every card you can get rid of is a good card. That's the problem, that this parallel Josh and Abby and the other two don't get that. They think Yeerks are people, with souls and rights and everything – as though God would make something like a Yeerk in His image. They're not people; they're hateful, evil vermin, and we need to kill as many of them as we can before they spread any farther. Period._

_So this is the end, _thought Sarem._ Eight years of living as another creature's daughter, and it all ends like this. Well, I can hardly complain; how did I expect it to end? Either the Andalites would win on Earth and destroy us all, or we would win and immediately have the Council send us out to conquer some new race, or the battle for this stupid planet would just continue until the summons came for me to spawn. The loss of everything, or a life of endless war: those are the options for a Yeerk of this generation. So who knows? Maybe I'm lucky to get out so soon._

_I must not think of it as betrayal,_ thought Anifal._ It was a craven act and unworthy of her, but it is foolish of me to feel personally betrayed. If Prince Josh allowed her to remain… but why, Elly, should you have chosen to remain? Was it nothing to you that we have not only defended your world together, but also exchanged gifts, participated in each other's rituals, and shared the secrets of our cultures – secrets, in some cases, that it was shame to share with any alien? I know that human ways are different from Andalite ways, but I cannot believe that you did not see the meaning of those things – and I will not believe that you did not care. But if you saw and cared, then why remain?_

And then there was Josh. The one I would actually have to face in a little while if I decided to stay – the one who was the main reason I wanted to stay at all – the one who, for good or bad, mattered differently to me from everyone else in the universe. If I live to be as old as the Ellimist, I don't think I'll ever forget Josh's thoughts.

_She might be in this very room now. I might be standing in the very place where she's standing – or sitting, or pirouetting to Bach fugues the way she used to do. Anyway, she's probably not more than a few rooms away – and two choices, of course. So close, and yet I can't get to her – can't reach out and draw on that fountain of sweetness and compassion that used to keep me sane when things got bad. All I have of her is a Yeerk-corrupted echo, and some dreams that I try not to think about; beyond that, I've lost her – lost her more thoroughly than if she were dead or infested, since at least then her body and I would be in the same world._

_Well, I'll do what I can for her now. Maybe it's a silly gesture to free her best friend, but she always wanted me to do it when she was here, and late is better than never. Beyond that… well, I'll just keep getting up every morning and carrying on as best I can until this war is over. Then, if we've won, maybe Chester and I can go out and try to find the Ssstram homeworld; if we find it, maybe their scientists can show me a way back to that other universe; and then, maybe, I can fly in her window and tell her, «You can come home now, Elly. The world is safe for you again; what's tender and precious in you doesn't need to be hidden any longer. Maybe it never did, as much as I wanted to hide it; if so, I'm sorry. I never meant for my wild guesses about military necessity to make my baby sister feel anything less than treasured. But the military necessity is over now, and I'd trap myself in flatworm morph if it would bring the treasure back again. So please, Elly, come home.»_

* * *

I don't know how long I hovered there, feeling that last part of Josh's thought over and over again, and wishing that hummingbirds could cry. All I know is that, eventually, I heard the Ellimist's voice in my head again. **Well, Eldora,** he said, **what say you?**

«Don't be a jerk,» I snapped. «You know perfectly well what I say.»

**Perhaps so,** said the Ellimist, **but I can do nothing until you say it. As I told you, Crayak and I have our rules.**

I sighed – or sobbed, I'm not sure which. «Okay, fine,» I said. «There's two things I have to say, then. The first is that you're a complete slime-face for making me see all this, and I hope that, when the Last Judgment comes, you get everything you have coming to you.»

**Very good,** said the Ellimist, not sounding very compunctious. **And the second thing?**

«The second thing is, let me out of this _palant_ and let me go home,» I said. «My friends are waiting for me.»


	33. Decision

**You are certain?** said the Ellimist.

We were back in my bedroom; I was in human form again, and the clothes I'd left on the Omegazoic seashore were back on my body. The Ellimist was sitting beside me on my bed, with his tailed curled up underneath his body, and staring up at me with the same expression that the real Lapkin has when he's waiting for me to give him his food dish.

I sighed. "Yeah," I said. "Yeah, I'm certain."

And I was. I wished I wasn't – even now, the thought of being a normal girl again and not having to fight Hork-Bajir was incredibly tempting, whatever happened to the Earth as a result – but I was, all the same. God had put me in the Morph Force, and the Morph Force needed me: it was as simple as that. I suppose I'd known it all the time; I'd just needed somebody to remind me.

**Very well,** said the Ellimist. (He didn't exactly sound relieved, but it felt somehow less tense when he spoke than it had before.) **Then you will wish to set out within the next few minutes. You will find that no time has passed during our colloquy; your friends will not think that you have delayed longer than is natural.**

I nodded. "Okay, thanks."

**You're welcome,** said the Ellimist. **And there is one other thing that I would counsel.**

"What?"

**The rest of the Morph Force expects you to morph the **_**thallataun**_** tree that will carry your party home,** said the Ellimist. **In our judgment, however, that would be unwise. You have already had one near brush with oblivion as a result of morphing a creature thats mind tends to indifferent acquiescence; if you were to become a plant, it is very doubtful that you could recover yourself in only two hours.**

I blinked. I'd almost forgotten about morphing the Ssstram ship; I guess you don't think much about small joys when big questions are on the line. Now that the Ellimist mentioned it, though, I suddenly realized how much I'd been looking forward to it. Getting to morph an alien tree that thought was the only really nice part about going back – and now were they going to take that away from me, too? It made sense, but still…

I bit my lip, and reminded myself that no-one had ever said that growing up would be easy. "Okay," I said. "I guess I'll tell the others I've changed my mind or something, then. Who should I get to do it instead?"

**Your brother's girlfriend would perhaps be best,** said the Ellimist. **Her temperament seems well suited to resist the **_**thallataun**_**'s instincts.**

That was true, I thought. Nobody was ever going to convince Abby to think like a tree. "Okay, I'll remember that," I said. "Is there anything else?"

**As it happens, there is,** said the Ellimist, and I got the impression that, if he had had some other face, he would have been smiling. **There is the matter of your gift.**

That startled me. "My gift?" I repeated, wondering whether the Ellimist had noticed some latent psychic powers in me or something.

**Yes,** said the Ellimist. **You have shown great virtue today, Eldora, and have done this universe a great service thereby. Our rules permit me to acknowledge this deed with a small token. I wish to do so.**

"Oh," I said, blushing. "Um… okay, then. So there's something you want to give me, you mean? A lovely-parting-gifts kind of thing?"

**I hope you will find it lovely,** said the Ellimist softly. **It is certainly so to me.**

He tapped his paw gently on the comforter underneath him, and I felt a strange sensation go through my body. It took me a second to realize that I was morphing – morphing without meaning to, and into something I'd never acquired. Thick, curly fur sprang up on my arms, then down my back; my fingers got thicker, and sprouted small claws; my nose and mouth reshaped themselves into a muzzle, and my ears grew out about a foot and then flopped down onto my cheeks. It felt almost like I was becoming a big dog, except that the basic shape of my body wasn't changing; my spine was still erect, and I didn't have any tail that I could feel.

Then I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror on my vanity, and I knew instantly what animal the morph was of. I'd never seen one before in real life, of course, but I'd seen a picture of one, that night at the ice-cream social when Chester told us where he came from. And I saw a stylized effigy of one every time Chester lowered his hologram.

A surge of utter happiness went through me. Probably most of that was the Pemalite instincts kicking in, but I don't think all of it was. I mean, here I'd just reconciled myself to not getting to acquire this strange and wonderful alien morph, and then a Stratego master from beyond the stars goes and gives me an even better one as a going-away present. My life isn't usually that nice to me.

I turned to the Ellimist, trying not to grin too broadly. «It's beautiful,» I said. «Who was she?»

**Nobody, **said the Ellimist. **The genetic pattern is a transposition of your own; it is the Pemalite you would hav****e been, had you been born to that race.**

«Oh.» I glanced in the mirror again, and almost wished I had. «Well, anyway, I'll treasure it. Thank you.»

**It was my pleasure, **said the Ellimist.

He tapped his paw again, and my body obediently demorphed back to human.** Go now, young wanderer Eldora, **he said. **Return to your world, and serve it well. And do not forget what you have seen here, but always remember what great things may depend on your actions.**

"I will," I said. "And, before you go…"

The Ellimist cocked his head. **Yes?**

I took a second to put my thoughts in order. I was never going to get to tell Josh this one, and I wanted to share it with somebody. "Jake the Animorph is in battle morph," I said. "He's coiled and ready to spring on a Hork-Bajir. What he doesn't know is that the Hork-Bajir has a beam weapon pressed against his back with his tail, and he's ready to pull it out and fire as soon as Jake moves a muscle. G to C."

For a brief moment, I had the satisfaction of seeing the Ellimist look utterly bewildered. Then he must have checked my mind and figured out what I was talking about, because he suddenly relaxed and chuckled. **The correct answer, **he said, **is **_**Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dracon**_**.**

"Good," I said.

The Ellimist smiled, and his cat body flickered for a moment; then the real Lapkin meowed sharply, pawed at the bed-sheets for a second or two, and then jumped off the bed and ran out of the room. (He's always been pretty easily spooked, and I guess being abstracted to another state of being wasn't really his cup of tea. I couldn't really blame him; it probably wouldn't have been mine, either.)

"Very good," I whispered.

* * *

And, for a couple seconds, I just sat there, savoring the goodness of things. Then, with a little sigh, I got up and went out to the loft; after stopping a second to give Lapkin (who was crouching warily underneath Mom's TV chair) one last scratch on the head, I went to the top of the stairs and called down, "Hey, Daddy? Is it okay if I go out for a little walk down the road?"

"I don't see why not," Daddy called back. "How long are you going to be gone?"

_Forever._ "I don't know, maybe an hour."

"Okay, that's fine."

"Thanks."


End file.
